Agreed on the points above.
Attending conferences is a great way to meet potential collaborators. Present your work (even two presentations when permitted) and attend talks of others. Try to chat with people after the session, either during breaks between sessions, but having lunch (or dinner) with them is better.
Writing to people whose work matches your interests is another approach. This worked well for me when I was the writer (who wrote with an idea of how someone may extend their work) and as the recipient of an email who followed up with a phone conversation on how a collaboration may work.
Although it can be difficult to do with strangers, at some point in the relationship, you'll come to an understanding of which strengths/interests of yours balance well with theirs. For instance, I most enjoy identifying improvement opportunities and designing new methods (e.g. algorithms) for solving them; meanwhile, computer programming, debugging, and output analysis are relative weaknesses of mine. I can conduct literature reviews with OK competence, but if a collaborator takes the lead on the lit review and initial writeup, then I'm happy with that. I'm a reasonably good writer and usually improve on the initial drafts of my favorite collaborators who did not learn English as early in life as I did. If you consider all the tasks on a research collaboration, you want to assign them based on the respective strengths, skills, and interests of each person.
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John Milne
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY
jmilne@clarkson.edu------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 07-14-2023 09:52
From: Barry Nelson
Subject: Finding Collaborators
In addition to the ideas mentioned here, I have often sought out people who know some methodology or application that I think is important for what I want to do, but I don't know that methodology or application very well myself. Sometimes this just ends with a conversation and some references, but many times it leads to a collaboration. I have frequently used this approach for creating (what I think are much stronger) grant proposals.
A related topic is what to do when you are approached about collaborating, a point about which Alan hints above.
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Barry Nelson
Walter P. Murphy Professor
Northwestern University
Evanston IL
Original Message:
Sent: 07-12-2023 20:01
From: Alan Scheller-Wolf
Subject: Finding Collaborators
I have been asked a couple of times for advice on finding research collaborations, so I thought I would provide a few things that have worked for me and invite others to chime in as well (I am interested to hear what other advice people have). To keep things concise I am limiting to five points...
- Choose collaborators first, and collaborations second: I have found WHO you work with is more important than WHAT you work on. Having the right people to work with makes research a joy.
- Be out there: Talk to people -- academics and practitioners -- about your work and their work. This is how you will find out if you have common interests, and also get an idea about what the person and their working style might be like.
- Be explicit: Before a project starts be clear on who is going to do what, how much time everyone plans to spend, timelines, outlets, authorship, etc.
- Be picky: You may have to say no to some attractive projects in order to do justice to the collaborations (and collaborators) you already have.
- Have fun! (Duh.)
Alan
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Alan Scheller-Wolf
Professor
Tepper School of Business
Pittsburgh PA
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