The author argues for the following potential challenges that may not lead to improved efficiency: 
- Based on the studies conducted, it was rare for the users to edit adjacent content synchronously.  
- Potential interferences to each other's work when programming while using synchronous code editors
- The ways in which how synchronous editing with computational notebook contributes to data scientists' work are yet to be well understood as the studies were within the contexts of collaborative writing and programming.  


Challenges associated with synchronous editing

April Yi Wang, Anant Mittal, Christopher Brooks, and Steve Oney. 2019. How Data Scientists Use Computational Notebooks for Real-Time Collaboration. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 39
(November 2019), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359141

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3359141

"How Data Scientists Use Computational Notebooks for Real-Time Collaboration"

With synchronous editing tools, the same notebook/document can be edited by multiple.  The edits are updated and saved real-time basis.   

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

When collaborative digitally, the following means of editing are used: 
- Synchronous editing
- Asynchronous editing

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