What is Collaborative Research?
Collaborative research is any research project that is carried out by at least two people. Collaborative research happens in many ways, and is more common in some fields than others. It is very common in the sciences, and less so in the humanities. Working with others on a research project can have several benefits, but there can be drawbacks as well. Often, researchers will choose to collaborate when a project is large or involved, or to pool their areas of expertise. For example, let’s imagine that two researchers are interested in a similar scientific topic. One researcher is an expert in statistical methods, and the other has collected a lot of data from a field experiment. If they collaborate, the researchers can combine their strengths and do sophisticated statistical analyses of the data from the field experiments. Usually the goal of collaborative research is to publish the results, and the researchers will divide up the work of writing up the results and navigating the publica
Collaborative research is when a fisherman or a group of fishermen work with a scientist to examine an issue that will improve the knowledge base or regulation of the ocean fisheries. The idea can be generated by either the fishing or the scientific community and will seek to sustain both the fisheries and the fishing way-of-life.
A. Collaboration has been intrinsic to the research process for the past 50 years, but collaboration per se usually refers to researchers who work within the same discipline, either within an institution or in different institutions. When a biochemist solves the crystal structure of a protein for a molecular biologist working on the regulation of the protein, that is a collaboration within the biological sciences. Multidisciplinary research is a form of collaborative research that involves researchers working across disciplines, either within an institution or in different institutions. A physician working with an engineer to manufacture a new imaging device, or an epidemiologist working with a political scientist on a tobacco-control initiative, is an example of a cross-disciplinary research project. When the pharmaceutical industry works with a medical center to perform a clinical trial of a new drug, it is a collaboration across industry and academia. Each of these interactions crea
The Consumers in NHS Support Unit (2001) proposes that there are three levels of user involvement in research: consultative, collaborative and user-led. The latter has been discussed already and consultation is often of minimal form (perhaps an informal request to look over a questionnaire). However, within collaborative research there are different levels of involvement. Collaborative research tries to weave features of user-focused research into more mainstream work. For example, in trials, user-researchers may have an influence on the outcome measures used (Perkins, 2001). To explain this further, I shall use some examples from the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. This is a collaborative unit that I coordinate and is staffed by service users. Its Director is a professor of psychology. In one trial involving SURE, the service user-researcher pointed out that the outcome measure – medication compliance – was inconsistent with the interv
