La colaboración científica: principales líneas de investigación y retos de futuro

Abstract

Resumen: La construcción del conocimiento es un proceso cooperativo que se ha intensificado considerablemente a lo largo de las últimas décadas, involucrando cualquier iniciativa de investigación a un número cada vez mayor de investigadores, instituciones, disciplinas y países. El presente estudio realiza una revisión bibliográfica de la literatura sobre colaboración científica. Se identifican los trabajos pioneros del área, el tipo de estudio y las variables analizadas. Se comenta la aproximación "clásica", basada en la obtención de indicadores bibliométricos, que ha adquirido una nueva dimensión analítica con el Análisis de Redes Sociales así como con las aproximaciones cuantitativas y cualitativas que tratan de indagar en las motivaciones y en las dinámicas del trabajo cooperativo. El estudio de la colaboración científica se ha abordado con metodologías y desde ópticas disciplinares muy diversas, según se puso de manifiesto en el Congreso "La colaboración científica: una aproximación multidisciplinar", celebrado en la Universitat de València en noviembre de 2013, que reunió a los principales expertos españoles en el tema. El presente ejemplar monográfico de Revista Española de Documentación Científica recoge una selección de diez trabajos presentados en el citado evento. Finalmente, se reflexiona sobre los principales retos que debe abordar la investigación en relación con la colaboración científica.Palabras clave: Colaboración científica; trabajo cooperativo; Ciencia y Tecnología; investigadores; investigación en colaboración. Scientific collaboration: main research lines and future challengesAbstract: The construction of knowledge is a collaborative process that has seen a dramatic growth over recent decades, since almost all research activities now involve increasing numbers of researchers, institutions, disciplines and countries. The present study provides a bibliographic review of the literature on research collaboration and identifies pioneering work on the topic, the types of studies undertaken and the variables analyzed. Several approaches are discussed: the "classical" approach, based on bibliometric indicators, which has taken on a new dimension with Social Network Analysis; and quantitative and qualitative approaches, which attempt to investigate the motivations and dynamics of collaborative work. The study of scientific collaboration has been undertaken using a variety of methodologies from different disciplinary perspectives. This was made evident at the Congress "Scientific collaboration: a multidisciplinary approach" held at University of Valencia in November 2013, which brought together leading experts on the subject from around Spain. This special issue of Revista Española de Documentación Científica contains ten selected papers presented at that event. We conclude this introductory paper by examining the main challenges that research into scientific collaboration should explore.

Evolución de las redes científicas y grupos de investigación. El caso de la psicología educativa en España durante los quinquenios 2004-2008 y 2009-2013.

“…Scientific collaboration plays an essential role in the professional activity of researchers (González-Alcaide and Gómez-Ferri, 2014). Although research by 'solo scientists' still predominates in some science areas such as humanities, individual activity is generally guided by membership or inclusion in research teams or research organisations, whether academic or a different type.…”

“…And the umbrella of the group or presumed collaboration might be used to hide mediocre and arriviste researchers, student promotion, or favour exchanges; collaboration might also be a merely utilitarian means to an end, e.g. access to funding, which has nothing to do with genuine, knowledge-boosting cooperation (González-Alcaide and Gómez-Ferri, 2014).…”

“…Authorship-based approaches have been implemented to analyse scientist networks; for example, it is fairly common to resort to citations as a main basis for the determination of the structure of links in a network. Bibliometric studies and social network analyses have been conducted studying data from PhD dissertations (Delgado López-Cózar, Torres-Salinas, Jiménez-Contreras and Ruiz-Pérez Delgado, 2006;, scientific areas and their interdisciplinarity Meyer et al 2014;Peñaranda-Ortega, Osca-Lluch and Quiñones Vidal, 2011), collaboration between institutions and countries (Russell, Ainsworth and Narváez-Berthelemot, 2006), between authors or journals (Ávila-Toscano, Marenco-Escuderos and Madariaga, 2014;González-Alcaide et al 2010), and bibliographic links in papers (González-Alcaide and Gómez-Ferri, 2014).…”

Assessment of Researchers Through Bibliometric Indicators: The Area of Information and Library Science in Spain as a Case Study (2001–2015)

“…First of all, it is difficult to measure individual contributions to research carried out in collaboration, and secondly, different studies have reported the inflationary tendencies of collaboration indexes (Cronin, 2001). Thus, a number of challenges need to be addressed before integrating scientific collaboration as a variable in research evaluation processes (Cronin and Weaver, 1995;González-Alcaide and Gómez-Ferri, 2014). These include further in-depth analysis into the processes that scientists use to attribute merit through publications in different disciplines and particularly the clarification of specific aspects such as author order, the role of the corresponding author, and other elements such as the acknowledgments.…”

Quién es quién en la investigación sobre Reestructuración de la Cartera de Negocios: La estructura intelectual

“…In view of the increased output of scientific articles over the past decades, the literature review would be very difficult to undertake using traditional qualitative methods. It is therefore necessary to handle bibliometric techniques for complementing the literature review in order to trace the origins of the study and locate the scientific community's most relevant papers and contributions (González-Alcaide and Gómez Ferri, 2014).…”