Nature Nanotechnology - Asia Pacific and Beyond forum: topic
This is a public forum
Calling all successful collaborations!
Ai Lin Chun
Tuesday, 28 August 2007 00:02 UTC
Good day everyone,
As you are probably aware, there is a column called Top Down Bottom Up in our journal and it’s meant to highlight the multidisciplinary nature of nanoscience and nanotechnology by going “behind the scenes” to explore how collaborations occur and work together. Collaborations could be between two or more different disciplines (e.g., physical scientists and biomedical researchers working together) or between academic departments and industrial researchers. The name of the section is intended to suggest how researchers with different expertise come at a problem from different directions.
If you have an interesting collaboration with someone, please drop me a line. We might pick your collaboration to highlight!
Thanks,
-Ai Lin.
-
Replies
-
Hi Ai-Lin,
Although I am afraid that it’s to late to respond to this topic, let me share my idea on collaboration.
The work published in PNAS I posted to this group before was a true collaboration between basic medicine and synthetic chemistry, and that was really successful I believe.
I think establishing good collaboration may need at least two “wisdoms”.
The first is that, leadership should be placed on one side, not on the both sides. In other words, equal collaboration cannot be established. It is quite alike what could happen in industry consolidations, or marriage sometimes. If the partners fight for leadership, no fruit they may have, after all.
Another tip is to keep your own specialty, not to go into the partners’. Although it would be nice to try to understand the partners’ area, but once you really do something in that area, you will be an enemy, not a partner anymore.
If you keep these principles in mind, I am sure that the collaboration should be end in success.In our previous case, we, the medical part, took the leadership. Also, both of us kept being in each specialty. That might have been the reason why we did have the great fruit.
—Mitsunobu
-
This is interesting…A few questions:
If one side of the collaboration takes leadership, how does the team consider itself a collaboration? Will this affect the level of contribution from the non-leading group? What sort of leadership roles are you referring to?
Also, in such a case, who determines the authorship of the paper at the end?
How would the collaborating teams communicate with one another if both are not equally immersed in the topic area?
-
It seems to me that it depends how the collaboration started in the first place. Based on personal experience, this is what I can say:
If I started the project and the whole idea came from my research group, however about 70-80 % down the road, we realised that we need some different expertise to wrap up the project, I think we should be the leaders in the collaboration and hold the first authorship.
In a second situation, I approached a researcher and gave him my samples to make a new type of materials. While the whole project would not have existed without my samples, but at the end of the day I think my collaborator should be the leader.
Usha
-
Here is a question that has been bugging me for a while:
When you write a manuscript, should you include a technician as a co-author? For examples, if someone is doing the AFM or TEM (I prepared all samples and the technician runs the equipment).
Is is possible to just mention the person’s contributions in the acknowledgement or the supporting information section?
Usha
-