LibGuides: Sharing Your Research: Collaboration

Launching your academic reputation early on is an important first step towards building collaborative research partnerships. Here are some career development ideas;

1. Establish a Presence. Create a LinkedIn, Google Scholar, Academia.edu, FigShare, or ResearchGate account(s) and begin to share and document your work. This will help to establish your credibility as a potential research partner later on.

2. Join the Conversation. Academic mailing lists, such as JISCMail are useful for finding out about new opportunities and developments, as well as establishing connections with likeminded researchers.

3. Keep Up To Date. Develop your own personalised current awareness service to keep up to date with developments in your area of research.

4. Identify Good Practice. Use metrics databases like Incites Journal Citation Reports, or Essential Science Indicators to identify key or up and coming researchers in your field. Reach out and make contact.

5. Create Learning Opportunities. The Global Mobility team at Edinburgh Napier offers support to staff and students looking to take in an exchange within Europe or overseas, or to set up a new reciprocal partnership.

Where do I go from there?

Start small. Get to know potential collaborators socially first. Twitter chats such as #PhDChat and #ECRChat are excellent for productive yet informal discussions and making new contacts. Brush up on your communication and team-working skills - you can find related resources on this page.

If you are considering becoming a Principal Investigator you will need to work on your grasp of financial management, project management, presentation, and leadership skills. See the University’s Researcher Development Programme and Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework for more information. The Library also holds a wealth of professional development material related to the above.

Collaborative Tools

MS Teams
Microsoft Teams brings conversations, content, assignments, and apps together in one place. It offers a centralised hub for communication and collaboration within a team, department or student group, allowing for meetings, content sharing and access to other apps. Available on all University-managed laptops.
WebEx
WebEx Meeting Center provides a real-time, collaborative web environment for meetings and learning & teaching events. All University computers are ‘WebEx ready’.
Google Hangouts
In addition to video chatting, Google Hangouts users can share documents, scratchpads, images and YouTube videos with other users. Google+ Hangouts also offers a "Hangouts on Air" feature for broadcasting live video conversations that are accessible to anyone with a web browser.

Benchling
Benchling is a life science data management and collaboration platform.
Evernote
Evernote is a popular cross-platform, freemium app with collarborative capabilities that is designed for note taking, organizing, and archiving.
Quartzy
Quartzy is an online laboratory management system designed for research labs at pharma, biotech, and academic institutions and organizations by managing lab inventories, submitting orders, tracking documents, and managing shared equipment.
Quip
Quip is a collaborative productivity software suite for mobile and the Web. It allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group.
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

Authorea
Authorea is an online collaborative writing tool that allows researchers and students to connect with colleagues and co-author classwork, research notes, and papers.
Draft
Draft is a streamlined collaborative writing platform that includes version control.
Typewrite
Typewrite aims to be “one of the best writing tools you’ve ever had” by offering real-time collaborative editing, which allows multiple authors to work on the same text at the same time.

Resources

Collaborative Research and Development Projects by Tom Harris; R. Browne (Foreword by)
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9783540460534
Publication Date: 2007
This book is a manual for all individuals and organisations from academia and industry working together on research and development projects. Whether grant funded, company to company or academic to company, this inspiring and highly readable book covers winning grant support, the legal arrangements, working with academics and practitioners, managing project progress and exploiting the project results. The examples, practical methods and tips in this book will not only help the reader prepare for grant applications, but more importantly help to achieve the best results and returns from every collaborative project.
Disciplining Interdisciplinarity - Integration and Implementation Sciences for Researching Complex Real-World Problems by Bammer, Gabriele
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9781922144270
Publication Date: 2013
This book provides collaborative research teams with a systematic approach for addressing complex real-world problems like widespread poverty, global climate change, organised crime, and escalating health care costs. The book makes a case for a new research style—integrative applied research—and a new discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences or I2S. It advocates for progressing these through an I2S Development Drive. It builds on theory and practice-based research in multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity, post-normal science, systemic intervention, integrated assessment, sustainability science, team science, mode 2, action research and other approaches.
International Virtual Teams by Pam Estes Brewer
Call Number: Ebook
ISBN: 9781119063957
Publication Date: 2015
This book is a complete guide to international virtual team communication with the most up-to-date research developments in the workplace on a global scale, and a problem-solving approach to using and communicating in virtual teams. Here you will find guidelines heavily based on empirical data, a case-study of the application of virtual team communication guidelines to the field of engineering, and strategies and sample projects for teaching.