most recent 30 from academia.stackexchange.com 2025-08-07T19:08:59Z https://academia.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=science+collaboration https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/rdf https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/208165 3 jserv https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/142206 2025-08-07T10:03:02Z 2025-08-07T11:40:21Z

<p>Apologies for the length, but all this context might matter. In 2019, I collaborated with an MD at a local hospital to write my thesis for a postgraduate degree. In my field, there is an expectation to publish the thesis as a paper after graduating, which I was keen on doing.</p> <p>I collected data alongside another student, with each of us reviewing around 150 medical records each. The clinician and one of her colleagues would match patients to specific clinical criteria we were looking for. I would then write the paper and run the statistical tests.</p> <p>Despite moving to another city and getting a job at a private company quickly after my degree, I reached out to my co-authors by e-mail to express interest in publishing the work as a journal article. The MDs agreed, though the other student dropped out. I shared my dataset, produced several different stats analyses, and wrote up a draft over the first few months of 2020.</p> <p>After a couple of Zoom meetings, my co-authors expressed concern about the quality of the dataset which hadn't come up previously, citing missing data. I no longer had access to the medical records, but assured them I collected the data as thoroughly as possible. Some data they assumed were there simply weren't present in the systems I had access to.</p> <p>They said they would check over records to verify these datapoints, but I am doubtful they really did so. Then, in the following months, we got into a cycle of their reviewing a draft, sending over comments, and me amending the paper accordingly. I created several redundant tables and figures which were later removed. By summer of 2020, I thought that we were unnecessarily repeating work and felt that I was being used as a workhorse. I wrote to them that I considered the paper about as &quot;complete&quot; as it possibly could be, and that we needed to edit it down to meet journal requirements to submit it.</p> <p>One co-author then unexpectedly said she wanted to redo the analysis with a statistician she personally knew. I said I was fine with this, since my analyses were fairly straight-forward and I wanted my findings verified. After a period of no communication at all, excuses were made throughout all of 2021 (e.g. the statistician is currently overworked). My own job was also extremely busy now, and I suspected they had actually just lost interest.</p> <p>Finally, I moved into a more relaxed role in 2022 and wrote to them to ask whether they wanted me to hire a statistical consultant, and that I had worked with a good one on a previous study. E-mails and voicemails went unanswered.</p> <p>In 2023, I simply went ahead and hired someone who helped assuage all my own concerns about the analyses, and produced very clear methods and figures which turned out to verify my original findings. I wrote my co-authors a message as a heads-up that I intended to submit it to the journal we had discussed previously.</p> <p>All of a sudden they sprang to life again and urged me not to before they could review. By this stage, I was really confused about their motivations; what issues could they have with the paper? What work would they do now that they hadn't done in the previous three years?</p> <p>Still, I at least had a response from them and said that I would happily continue to work on the paper <strong>on the condition that we set a deadline by e-mail to submit the paper</strong>. One of my co-authors suggested week 6, 2024. I agreed, but did not want to discuss over Zoom and said I had no time for further calls. This was partially so they would be forced to address specific issues, but also because I wanted everything in writing.</p> <p>They rose around eight points, one of which was a suggestion for tables and references that took us over the limit of the target journal, several of which were based on their misunderstanding of the paper, and a minor error in one of the tables. I addressed them all anyway.</p> <p>In the meantime, I had entered an academic role and ran the paper by a couple of colleagues, both recognised global experts on the topic. Both told me that the paper was crystal clear, could not understand my co-authors concerns, and thought something else was going on.</p> <p>On week 6, I sent a courtesy e-mail about submitting the paper, edited down to journal requirements, and sent it in. To my surprise, I received e-mails from both shortly after expressing their disappointment, how important it is for co-authors to agree (especially my co-author as &quot;primary scientist&quot;), that this conduct was highly unprofessional and urged me to discuss with them over Zoom. At no point do they say what they need to discuss, what their concerns are, or why they did not raise them in the timeline that they set.</p> <p>I have considered writing back, but I have already decided I don't intend to work with either of them again. With all that, I write to you with three questions:</p> <ol> <li>This journal allows co-authors to retract their co-authorship if they so choose, but do they have any other recourse to prevent me from publishing the paper?</li> <li>What could they have possibly been so coy about? Primary authorship? Data quality?</li> <li>Have I been subject to an elaborate five-year-long practical joke?</li> </ol>

https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/68039 14 DirtStats https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/44869 2025-08-07T02:26:21Z 2025-08-07T07:25:44Z

<p>This past year I put in an application to a federal agency (US) for a post-doctoral fellowship and collaborated on it with a three profs/research scientists on the proposal. If funded, one of them will act as my post-doc supervisor and the other two as collaborators, all bring necessary skills and methodological capacity to the project. The project idea was my own that I had before meeting or discussing it with these collaborators, I chose to work with these people because they are researchers whose work I was familiar with and they are located in a city I'm interested in living in. </p> <p>I have accepted a different post-doc since that application was submitted and I expect that application to be rejected because it was still a bit rough when submitted and it's a pretty competitive grant. Since I took the other position, I won't be doing this project with these collaborators in under this recent application. This is my first time as part of a multiple collaborator application, so I am wondering:</p> <p>Who has ownership of an idea after grant rejection/do all members of a proposal collaboration have to be informed of any member independently moving forward with an idea from the proposal? </p>

https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/51289 29 Paul Julian https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/38367 2025-08-07T23:49:55Z 2025-08-07T05:42:03Z

<p>Lately it feels like I haven't been doing enough both personally and professionally. I am very productive at both my place of employment and my graduate studies (i.e. PhD in Soil and Water Science) however I want to be more active. I am perfectly content with crunching numbers, developing models, researching the literature, writing up results, etc...I know I am kinda...well nerdy and weird that way. </p> <p>Recently I have begun reaching out to scientists in my field asking if they would like to collaborate in an effort to gain more experience with different kinds of data and ecosystems, make more connections, etc. When I offer to collaborate most don't respond...which I completely understand being an overworked scientists in the publish or perish game who needs another person to slow you down? Meanwhile some respond with a "sure love too" then when I follow up with questions or brainstorming ideas no one responds. </p> <p>Is it proper to email say a professor with an email indicating that I am interested in their work and would like to collaborate on any projects? If they respond with a "Yes, love to work with you" type email with subsequent emails falling on deaf ears, is it them nicely trying to say bugger off? </p>

https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/62120 0 Aleksandr Blekh https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/12391 2025-08-07T11:20:52Z 2025-08-07T17:14:38Z

<p>I'm curious about what strategies, approaches and/or methods people (successfully) use in academia for motivating colleagues to adopt innovative research collaboration mechanisms, workflows and/or tools. Please share your experience or point to proven range of approaches.</p> <p>The following is in lieu of background information. Currently I'm leading a university project for developing a software platform for scientific research and e-collaboration in a particular scientific domain. Earlier I have installed, configured and publicized another software platform with a goal of increasing research productivity and make scientific collaboration and reproducibility easier within our group and beyond. Unfortunately, after initial decent interest of some people, most of them (and the rest) went back to "doing business as usual". I understand that researchers are busy and are under a lot of pressure to meet/exceed expectations and due to career advancement demands. I don't want to shove innovation down people's throats, but, at the same time, I'm quite frustrated that people do not see (or don't want to see, or don't care) significant potential benefits of some new ways in doing research and/or scientific software development in academia.</p> <p>Considering the high visibility of my current project, I started thinking about / trying to come up with novel strategies and approaches to <strong>motivating</strong> colleagues in academia toward adopting <em>innovative methods/tools</em> (i.e., Agile) through <em>emphasizing</em> their <strong>potential benefits</strong> and/or <strong>lost opportunity</strong> in research productivity and other aspects, when such innovative methods/tools are not used.</p>

https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/9048 4 Ohad Dan https://academia.stackexchange.com/users/6645 2025-08-07T16:41:39Z 2025-08-07T07:17:54Z

<p>I am taking part in a seminar-course given to graduate neuroscience students. The students come from various backgrounds; mainly - Computer science, physics and life science (biology).</p> <p>In the current course format, each student chooses an interesting neurobiology subject and gives a short (1 hour) literature overview of it.</p> <p>This format works well, but I feel the course does not fulfill its full potential.</p> <p>I am trying to think of a new, better format for this course - suggestions would be warmly appreciated.</p> <p>An example vision is of a medium sized project that could be divided into a few sub projects, each would be assigned to one or a small group of the students. Ideally :</p> <ul> <li>The project would have some impact on \ helpful to the science community.</li> <li>Each sub-project would allow its student to shine by using his unique background.</li> <li>The sum of all the mini-projects would be greater of its parts.</li> </ul> <p>An example of such a project would be to create a new or expand an existing (wiki-like) open knowledge-base of a specific subject.</p> <p>Your ideas would be greatly appreciated.</p>

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