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Collaborative Scholarship: Why and How

Elizabeth C. Matsui
Roger D. Peng

Collaboration is not typically included as a topic in the formal curriculum of graduate school or as a part of career training activities for post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty, but for many faculty, collaboration is the richest aspect of their professional lives. This may come as a surprise to some, who may wonder if collaboration is truly worth the effort.

Why collaborate 1

Collaboration is a mechanism for learning. Life-long learning is generally highly valued among academics, and collaboration offers a different avenue for learning that complements activities like reading, attending seminars, etc. Expanding your “routine” ways of learning to include collaboration intellectually enriches your professional life. Collaboration can also greatly enrich the creativity and impact of the scholarly work. The addition of diverse perspectives and expertise to a project increases the likelihood of new discoveries. From a practical perspective, collaboration can increase productivity. In a successful collaboration, projects will naturally spin off from the initial project, and having multiple collaborators allows each to take the lead on a different project. Beyond these professional benefits, collaboration is a natural way to build a support network. An academic career is full of twists and turns that are often specific to the academy or even the field and having partner(s) to share the experience with over the short and long term can be valuable for providing career support and guidance. Last, but not least, collaboration can lead to life-long friendships. So much so, that we coined a new term “collabofriend” in episode 89 of The Effort Report 2, our podcast about life in academia.

There are certainly disincentives for collaborating, which are important to consider. For example, relationships are complicated and many collaborations fizzle out or, even worse, are contentious. The incentives in academia tend to reward individuals over teams, as tenure is focused on the individual’s scholarly contributions to their field and its impact. Although institutions have recognized the need to revisit incentive structures to reward collaborative scholarship—often referred to as “team science” in science—it’s not clear that there has been a major shift in the promotions and tenure evaluation processes to reflect this goal. Collaboration may also take more time—at least in the early stages when relationship building, establishing processes and structures (such as the cadence and format of meetings and roles and responsibilities), and learning the language of other fields for interdisciplinary collaboration, must be done before being able to meaningfully embark on the project at hand.

How to collaborate

What research says. While for some people, collaboration seems to come naturally, for many, it does not. This observation is reflected in the scholarly work on collaboration, which has characterized key elements of successful collaboration but also highlighted that faculty are often unprepared for successful collaboration 3. These key elements include:

A common goal or mutual benefit

Voluntary engagement

Agreed upon process and structure for the work, such as the cadence and format of meetings and roles and responsibilities of each team member

Shared decision-making

Shared understanding of a problem domain

Without these key elements, it’s hard to imagine a path that exists for successful collaboration.

What our experience says. About a decade ago, we shared our perspectives on a specific type of collaboration—between clinician scientists and biostatisticians—in a pair of blog posts 45, and much of the advice is generalizable to scholarly collaborations. One thing that has become clear over years of participating in and observing collaborations is that having the key elements of collaboration outlined above in place is far from a guarantee of successful collaboration. Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the success of a project is when there is the perception that you share a common goal, when you do not. A shared goal is critical to a collaborative project’s success. While a shared goal is important for the success of a collaborative project, shared values are critical to long standing productive collaborations. For example, in our field, the ultimate goal is to improve public health and we do that through advancing the science. A pitfall is assuming that the value of advancing science is shared among colleagues. For example, a colleague may be focused on short-term career advancement goals while you are focused on the long-term goal of advancing your field because of you value advancing science more than short-term career success. Sometimes these two types of goals are aligned, but often they are not because someone with their eye on short-term career advancement may be focused on getting a paper published as quickly as possible, even if it means the work is less rigorous or impactful, to build their CV. This disconnect between short-term goals related to career advancement and long-term goals that reflect values can stymie progress, interfere with the creative process, and cause unhealthy conflict. If you think of your job as advancing the field, then you end up with long lasting collaborations. Why? Because you look for colleagues who share this value—that the long-term goal of our jobs is to advance our fields. Having shared values helps to ensure that the collaboration is not bounded by a contractual arrangement where one team member provides a service in exchange for a defined and tangible compensation. Such contractual, or transactional, arrangements can stifle the freedom needed for creativity and establishing a long-lasting partnership.

Finding colleagues who share this value goes a long way toward ensuring a successful collaboration. However, a second ingredient is also required: mutual respect. This sounds obvious, but how does mutual respect play out in practice?

First, all good collaborations involve some teaching and some learning. Although your major contribution is your expertise, your collaborator(s) still need to have some understanding of your area of expertise so that you can communicate effectively. Similarly, you will need to have some understanding of your collaborator(s) area(s) of expertise. When teaching, be patient and don’t patronize. To learn, don’t hesitate to ask questions when you don’t understand something.

Second, good collaborations are self-sustaining as one project leads to another (or multiple projects). However, they are only self-sustaining if collaborators generously share data and ideas with each other.

Third, be respectful of time. It’s discouraging to get last-minute requests from a collaborator, which sends a message that your time is less valuable than theirs. If you are leading the project, thoughtfully plan out the timeline together. Be realistic about the timeline and build in “cushion” for the inevitable unexpected hiccups.

Fourth, understand that your collaborator is not a technical tool or instrument. In our field, some can fall into the trap of viewing the biostatistician as someone who “crunches numbers” or a biologist as someone who runs assays on biologic specimens and sends the results or a clinician as someone who collects biospecimens. This reductive view leads to a major missed opportunity—which is that collaborators who bring technical skills to the team also bring intellectual skills to the team, which are likely more valuable than the technical skills. This reductive view also sends the message that you view the collaboration as a transactional partnership rather than an intellectual partnership.

Fifth, “go where they are.” You might read this and think that you should be sure to go to their office for meetings, and while this is a nice gesture, really what we mean is to go to the place where they do their work. For collaborations between people in the same field, this of course is not necessary, but when collaborating across fields, a first-hand look at how your collaborator does their work is illuminating and you will learn things you could not learn simply through talking with your collaborator.

Sixth, their business is your business, so pitch in. If you narrowly define the scope of your role, you risk sending the message that you view the collaboration as a transactional relationship; that you approach the relationship as if there is a contract with a scope of work and you won’t deviate from that. In a mutually respectful collaboration, colleagues appreciate that the broader body of work that their collaborator is pursuing is directly connected to their own work, so that helping a collaborator on a project that might not have been explicitly spelled out as part of the agreed upon collaborative work helps the collaboration.

In the end, it’s the relationship that drives the scholarly work and not vice versa. If there’s mutual respect and genuine interest in each other’s work, it’s more likely than not that collaborative scholarly work will naturally emerge from the relationship. On the other hand, if colleagues are brought together because of a shared interest in a particular area of scholarship—which happens when people are brought together to participate in workshops or other activities to catalyze collaboration—it’s unlikely a fruitful collaboration will emerge without these relationship fundamentals. Perhaps the best advice is to find the people you want to work with and the scholarship will follow.

References

[1]
Diane Sonnenwald, Scientific Collaboration: A Synthesis of Challenges and Strategies, ARIST 41 (2007), DOI 10.1002/aris.2007.1440410121.
[2]
[3]
Catherine Newell and Alan Bain, Academics’ perceptions of collaboration in higher education course design, Higher Education Research & Development 39 (2020), no. 4, 748–763, DOI 10.1080/07294360.2019.1690431.
[4]
[5]

Credits

Photo of Elizabeth C. Matsui is courtesy of Dell Medical School/Sloan Breeden.

Photo of Roger D. Peng is courtesy of Roger D. Peng.