title: Repertoires: How to Transform a Project into a Research Community.
abstract: How effectively communities of scientists come together and co-operate is crucial both to the quality of research outputs and to the extent to which such outputs integrate insights, data and methods from a variety of fields, laboratories and locations around the globe. This essay focuses on the ensemble of material and social conditions that makes it possible for a short-term collaboration, set up to accomplish a specific task, to give rise to relatively stable communities of researchers. We refer to these distinctive features asrepertoires, and investigate their development and implementation across three examples of collaborative research in the life sciences. We conclude that whether a particular project ends up fostering the emergence of a resilient research community is partly determined by the degree of attention and care devoted by researchers to material and social elements beyond the specific research questions under consideration.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology & Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), University of Exeter, Byrne House, St Germans Road, EX4 4PJ Exeter, UK; s.leonelli@exeter.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Sabina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Leonelli
authors.affiliation: School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, Australia, rachel.ankeny@adelaide.edu.au.
authors.forename: Rachel A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Ankeny
keywords: Community building; data; scientific epistemology; scientific methods; scientific norms