Who out there wants to increase your productivity while having a lot of fun and making friends? Do these things go together? Absolutely! The smartest and most successful professors know that collaborating is the name of the game. Here are a few reasons why you should collaborate.
Why Collaborate?
I have a desire to be wealthy one day. If you are scratching your head and wondering why I chose academics as a career path, I wouldn’t blame you. Anyway, I’ve read a lot of books about wealth and they all seem to share a similar theme—passive income. It’s all about passive income! With passive income you can earn money while you sleep or hang out on the beach. This is essentially what happens with a good collaborator, only publications are the wealth of which I speak. For instance, I once had a Fulbright scholar contact me who was doing research in India asking if I wanted to submit a grant. It was due in a few days so we started working like crazy on it. I would work on it until late at night and because of the time difference when I would send it to him he would just be waking up. We kept trading off like this for three days and got the grant submitted on time. Of course this usually isn’t how it works, but you can work on only one manuscript at a time in a given minute, but with good collaborators you can be working on multiple manuscripts simultaneously!
Synergy and Ideas
Another hugely important reason to collaborate is to multiply your intellectual resources. I believe in the idea that 1 + 1 = 3. When you work together you create this sense of collaborative energy some call “synergy.” Think of all the times when you came up with ideas with the help of others that you know you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.
Reduce Isolation and Loneliness
A third reason to collaborate is because it is fun and you can make friendships that may last a lifetime. Being an academic can be socially isolating and lonely. You may feel the pressure to spend long hours in front of your computer in order to produce the work necessary to get tenure. However, collaborating gives you a needed respite that can be refreshing AND enhance your productivity! So hopefully you are convinced that it’s worthwhile to collaborate or to collaborate more often. So how do you find really good collaborators?
Tips for Finding Good Collaborators
Collaborating with just anyone is not good. In fact, a bad collaborator can really slow you down and actually hurt your progress due to not so great ideas or having to wait around forever. Non-responsive collaborators can be a major drag on your productivity. Here are some four things to look for in a good collaborator:
1. Productive Track Record
If they have a productive track record of publishing in good journals, this is a great indication that this person would be an ideal collaborator because they have already proven they can do it. You could learn a lot from this type of person.
2. Statistical or Other Skill
Statistical knowledge or other skill related to your particular field is very important to keep your research strong and cutting edge. In addition to providing needed expertise for a particular manuscript, ideally, this person could help teach you how to do that particular analysis and so you will be better off in the future. After all, you really learn best by doing!
3. Complementary of Your Style
If you are a perfectionist, you will probably want someone who will keep you moving along and help you to “procrastinate your perfectionism.” Likewise, if you tend to be sloppy, maybe you want a perfectionist to help catch your errors and keep things precise and strong. Bill O’Hanlon, author of Write is a Verb, describes a collaborator, “With whom I have done four books, who is much better at details than I am. If I can’t find a reference as the editing process comes to a close, I am likely to throw out the sentence or paragraph. He would search to the ends of the earth to find the missing reference.” We all have strengths and weaknesses and finding someone to help shore up your weaknesses will be extremely helpful.
4. Critically Minded
Sometimes we tend to shy away from individuals who are critical, because we are afraid of having our feelings hurt. However, these are the very type of people who can really help bring us to the next level. They can point out issues in our writing or study design that we may not have thought of ourselves, which if we address, will help us to become much better researchers. It’s better to have a collaborator point out a problematic issue PRE-submission rather than have a reviewer or editor reject the manuscript because of that problem.