Research collaboration experiences, good and bad: Dispatches from the front lines

The scant literature on individual scientists collaboration dynamics is used to develop a provisional model of research collaboration effectiveness. It incorporates external, collaborator, and team management factors, forming the basis for our theoretically informed qualitative analysis. We use this provisional model to guide semi-structured interview themes, deriving data from 60 US academic researchers, selected from a range of scientific and engineering disciplines as well as one social sciences discipline (economics). We present our findings in the form of respondent quotations related to the provisional model. We then conduct a further content analysis on the organizing constructs of respondent-assessed good and bad collaboration responses. The results of this second thematic coding of the interview data form the basis for the refinement of our model to include additional indicators, and to discuss some preliminary expectations about the associative relationships among the external, collaborator, and team management factors that contribute to scientist collaboration.