The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Dimensions of Success and Failure in Research Collaboration

Abstract

Failure is a common experience in society, and analyses of failure have been important for developing social theory. This article analyzes how chemical scientists experience failure in both credited and uncredited research collaborations. Credited work produces the outputs that are evaluated by administrators and analyzed by social scientists. Thus, "credit" is closely tied with visibility in science. But chemical scientists often engage in uncredited collaboration as well. Uncredited collaborations are not opportunities to receive formal credit for one's work, but chemical scientists still engage in uncredited work in order to meet the metrics by which they are evaluated. Analyzing 106 interviews with chemical scientists, this article builds a framework for understanding success in collaboration. The two dimensions of this framework that shape experience of success and failure are (1) whether a collaboration produced outputs and (2) whether expectations are met. Collaborative expectations often go unmet, but these disappointments rarely undermine collaborations from producing credited outputs. Novice scientists often have positive experiences in uncredited collaboration despite not receiving credit for their work. Success and failure are experienced differently in credited and uncredited collaboration. Institutional pressures often create circumstances for failure in collaborations while also keeping scientists invested in unsuccessful collaborations.

Understanding and Addressing Problems in Research Collaboration: A Qualitative Interview Study From a Self-Governance Perspective

“…The key to both understanding and addressing problems in collaborative research are, in our view, the experiences and expectations of RC participants. This concurs with an understanding of collaboration problems that has been outlined by Sacco ( 2020 ), who argued that failure of RC may result from unmet expectations of the researchers involved and thus from their individual experiences during collaboration. Therefore, these expectations can explain why collaboration might become problematic.…”

“…However, like any other type of collaboration, RCs face specific problems, including personal differences between participants or ineffective communication (e.g., Youtie and Bozeman, 2014 ; Bozeman et al, 2016 ). If such problems are not addressed, substantial risks to productivity and to the success of scientific work may result (e.g., Bozeman et al, 2016 ; Sacco, 2020 ). While there are studies which provide comprehensive lists of factors that are either detrimental or supportive in the context of RC for specific disciplines (e.g., Bozeman et al, 2016 ; Volk, 2021 ), this issue has not been addressed for RC in general.…”

“…Our focus lies on normative expectations: In contrast to empirical expectations, which describe what individuals expect others to actually do, normative expectations refer to how individuals think others should behave (see Bicchieri, 2006 ). For instance, a researcher may perceive that his/her collaborators are not behaving as ethically as expected (e.g., Sacco, 2020 ). Accordingly, our first research question is as follows:…”

“This is no Eden:” Three generations of researchers coping with team conflicts in an outstanding research environment

“…In a sense the same scenario illustrates collaborative failure as well. Sacco (2020) suggests that "complete success" in research collaboration entails both bibliometric outputs and experiences of a supportive environment, while "visible success" involves bibliometric outputs, but is coupled with "experiential failure" with respect to the collaborators' interpersonal relationships and resources. It appears that the junior researchers in our case were mainly predestined to experience the latter, since their struggling for independence came with a high risk of becoming a victim in still another relationship conflict.…”

How do researchers perceive problems in research collaboration? Results from a large-scale study of German scientists

“…To an ever growing degree, scientific knowledge is the product of collaborative research (Baker et al, 2017). However, when substantial problems arise in the interaction between members of a research collaboration (RC), the success of the collaboration is at risk (Bozeman et al, 2016;Sacco, 2020). To foster the understanding of which problems are particularly important for RCs, this paper builds on previous work, which compiled a theoretically and empirically informed catalog of seven typical problems that research teams experience (Meißner et al, 2022).…”