28 June 2010
By Matthew Salois
Research advice from Vanilla Ice may be an unlikely source, but this verse was on repeat in my head recently:
All right stop, collaborate and listen!
Last June, my department hired a new post-doc and we began to share an office together. At first we did not say much to each other as we both get quite integrated into our work and let the outside world sort of dissolve around us.
However, I decided one day to stop what I was doing and try to engage the new post-doc in conversation. It wasn’t long before we realised we shared some mutual research interests. In fact, the new post-doc was a quite a bit more knowledgeable on matters of economic development and international trade, two key areas I was hoping to break into.
We decided to collaborate on a paper together and the experience has proved to be an exceptional one. We have completed a draft of the paper which was accepted and presented at a conference in March and just recently accepted to a conference in Cape Town in November. Before the end of the year we expect to submit the paper to a journal which will hopefully be accepted.
This experience has taught me the valuable lesson of collaboration. I now have two additional conference presentations and a working paper that will hopefully become a journal publication. I could not have done this on my own and especially in such a short amount of time.
There is a need as post-docs to prioritise our own research and interests from time to time. The nature of the job requires that we go beyond the one or two projects we are hired to work on if we are to advance in our field.
As Vanilla Ice nicely states, there are times when we just need to stop and collaborate!
Andy Humphrey29 June 2010 at 01:20 PM
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Worthy sentiments, Matthew, and congratulations on a successful collaboration - and once again I find myself envying you social scientists for the freedom that you get! In my discipline that kind of spontaneous collaboration just isn't possible because you also need the resources - chemicals, glassware, consumables, machine time on the analytical instruments - and someone would have to pay for it all. With grant money being so tight, few PIs would be happy with the idea of money being diverted away from the project it's supposed to be used to resource - which would leave me with the unacceptable alternative of funding the experiments myself! I also suspect the time to do the research is going to be correspondingly longer in a discipline like synthetic chemistry, where every failed reaction basically represents half a day's work and then back to the drawing board. And again, that's time away from a defined project with a deadline for completion of the work, a deadline that our PIs can ill afford to jeopardise.
Blanka Sengerová29 June 2010 at 02:02 PM
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I concur with Andy's comment, that was exactly what occurred to me yesterday when I read Matthew's post - in biochemistry I also think such 'off the cuff' collaborations would be limited by the availability of enzymes/strains/consumables. That is not to say that I don't go and talk to members of other groups to discuss specific techniques that they may have more experience in and I want to learn about and vice versa. During my PhD I have also stopped working on my immediate project to do some experiments for some collaborator of ours but this was with my supervisor's agreement and we both ended up on the subsequent paper.
Sarah Davies29 June 2010 at 02:20 PM
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This seems to be an interesting difference between social and natural scientists - though it seems odd that this kind of unexpected collaboration would *never* happen in lab-based work. What about the analysis and writing stages? Do you ever talk about something with a colleague with slightly different interests and realise they have a new perspective on what your data is telling you? And Matthew, were you working with fresh data or something from your own or your officemate's previous work?
Matthew Salois29 June 2010 at 05:42 PM
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Andy, you make a good point regarding the differences in terms of collaboration difficulties between the social and natural sciences. When I think about the equipment you must use and the reliance on primary data collection, things to become quite complicated I imagine. But what about secondary data? How difficult would it be to collaborate on a paper but extending a previous analysis so that the data is already collected? Blanka, it seems you have similar experiences to Andy in terms of collaboration. In my case, I did not approach my PI for permission and just decided to delve into the project with my office mate. Sarah, I share your sentiments. While I take Andy's and Blanka's experience to heart, I would like to think that even lab-based work permits from some ease of collaboration. In my case, the dataset had to be collected and assembled. Although the data is secondary (e.g., trade flows given by the IMF, population given by the World Bank, etc.), it was timely to assemble the individual variables into a comprehensive dataset.
Tennie Videler02 July 2010 at 10:42 AM
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Hi, I can't beleive Vanilla Ice said that... as a lab based scientist who has worked in different labs and on different techniques I have had very different experiences with attitudes to collaboration. My last postdoc involved a technique that we were pushing into new applications. It was vital to us to apply it to new biological systems. We were approached by lots of people with really interesting biological questions that they hoped we might be able to answer. So we would regularly give their samples a whirl and see how it went..... This was enormous fun and really helped us develop the technique and showcase its usefulness (and gave me a far broader insight into biology than I could have imagined). Crucially, the PI in charge of the group was very supportive of everyone doing this. The project I was working on before involved a more established technique and I did the biological work myself so there was less scope for collaboration, although I got help for specialised aspects from people. In fact, the PI there was asked for the use of our fabulous instrumentation for a rather high-risk (but potentially high-gain) experiment and refused as he was convinced it wouldn't work. These people went to a different lab abroad- the experiment worked and the other lab got some names on a very highly rated paper out of it.....
Andy Humphrey05 July 2010 at 02:32 PM
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Sarah: "Do you ever talk about something with a colleague with slightly different interests and realise they have a new perspective on what your data is telling you?" Yes - pretty much every day, in my institute, a discussion like that happens. It's one of the joys of working in an interdisciplinary field like cancer research. That way I'm able to refine and develop my current project (or, rather, my PI's). That way also, on my previous project, I was able to get new spin-off projects started that I hoped would lead to publications. The problem with a science like mine or Blanka's is that before any of these ideas are publishable, or can go in a grant proposal, a lot of labour-intensive, and resource-intensive, preliminary experiments have to be done first. The spin-off project I mentioned above took 2.5 months of a project student's time, and about 5 months of my own lab time, with my then PI's permission - and at the end of all this, the crucial experiments failed and I wasn't able to publish after all. Sadly, in chemistry there's no such thing as the Journal of Failed Reactions...