How to... collaborate on writing an article
Print view
Article Sections
- Writing articles from large collaborative projects
- Smaller scale collaborations and working with PhD students
- Writing the article: planning, communicating and working on drafts
- Who comes first? Settling the order of contributors
Writing articles from large collaborative projects
In the field of management, large-scale multidisciplinary teams working on big projects are commonplace. Such projects are often heavily funded and extend across institutions, countries, and sectors: it is not uncommon for several universities to be involved and perhaps a blue-chip company as well.
Collaborative research is now a common part of the research landscape, and commonly yields not one but up to half a dozen journal articles, as well as reports and possibly books. It may be difficult for the individual researcher especially if he or she is relatively junior, not to feel that their individual publishing efforts may become submerged. However, if well planned, there will be plenty of opportunities for all. There are a number of points to consider:
In this section
Strategic planning
Establishing a dissemination strategy, which looks at the how, where and who of publishing, should be part of the project planning process.
This strategy should consider not only the dissemination of the final results, when all the data are complete, but also at the different stages of the research process, for example it may be that part of the project requires doing a very extensive literature review in a so far uncharted but highly significant area. It should also be flexible enough to consider the opportunities that may arise at particular stages, for example a particular colleague may come at the data from a different disciplinary angle, or results may throw up a new line of enquiry.
The dissemination strategy should look to deliberately maximize the quantity and quality of the work published. These days the wide-scale measurement of research outputs – the UK RAE being an obvious example – it is important to maximise the data set and identify as many publishing angles as possible.
The dissemination strategy should also take account of:
- Access to data, and ownership of intellectual property, i.e. is it joint, or does the person who collected the data have sole access for research purposes?
- Who will publish what, where and how – identify particular journals, bearing in mind:
- what audiences you wish to reach, for example it may be that certain aspects of your research will be particularly interesting to a particular discipline
- what your strategic objectives are – do you wish to add to the body of published research, in which case you will target (probably top quality) academic journals, or do you wish to disseminate your findings to practitioners
- Who will be first author, and lead the writing of the article?
Example
Two researchers (from the USA and Australia) collaborated on a large-scale historical project which resulted in a book and six papers. One person collected the archival material and the other carried out a preliminary analysis. Together they decided on a series of papers, on each of which they split roles which they swapped for different papers. For example on one paper, one did a first draft which was mainly descriptive while the other did the second draft which was more explanatory analysis; on another, one did the environmental background and context and the other added the specific historical case study findings.
On another major funded research project, two researchers conducted a study which used semi-structured interviews and collection of texts such as official documents, website material and reports. Except where prevented by logistics, both carried out the interviews (which were then professionally transcribed) and both had equal access to the data.
Working in a multi-disciplinary environment
Multidisciplinary teams are very common in the management field, which is a strength as it means that you have the benefit of different perspectives.
For example, your team may include people from Operations Management and Human Resource Management/Organizational Behaviour. Researchers from each of these fields may identify different angles, from which they develop articles with the slant of their disciplines, taking a particular part of the data. Thus, if the data set concerns the establishment of a new IT system in organizations, the OM people are more likely to be interested in the part of the data which is concerned with operational issues, whereas the OB people may be more interested in people's perceptions of their change in role.
Example
Sometimes, multidisciplinary collaboration means not just having different perceptions on data but being prepared to step outside the paradigms of your own discipline and adopt the perspectives of another discipline in order to build new theories. Michael Hyman (1990), in an article "Unbounded collaboration: a way to broaden and improve marketing theory", talks about collaborations with colleagues in other disciplinary areas which have the object of bringing in the perspective of other disciplines to look at marketing problems and thereby improve marketing theory. This involves a lot of unstructured dialogue with the other party and listening carefully to the ways in which they do things.
Establishing relationships
Much has been written about the theory of teams and team-building, but ultimately good team-work is a matter of developing good relationships. Research is often long-term, laborious, and full of setbacks so it is important to develop a good personal chemistry.
Collaborative work should be based on respect and equality. Every team member should be valued, from the person at the beginning of their PhD to the professor with a list of publications as long as bank holiday shopping list. Asymmetrical relationships which value fame and disparage inexperience may damage the cooperative endeavour.
Openness and honesty is critical: team members should know that they can trust one another to do what they say they will do and not make arbitrary decisions, e.g. about cutting out a particular part of the data from an article without clearing it with others. Equally, it is important to have an atmosphere where everyone can 'think aloud', voice concerns, etc. Good team work may be hampered both by someone who is overly shy and diffident and by a very dominant, dogmatic personality.
Example
CIBER (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) is a large-scale ongoing interdisciplinary research group which is concerned with the mapping, monitoring and evaluating of digital information systems, platforms, services and environments. It comprises a multidisciplinary team of information media specialists including publishers, librarians and journalists, and researchers come from University College London and City University (UK), the University of Tennessee (USA), the University of Warsaw (Poland), and Elsevier Science publishing. The group is engaged in a number of different projects at any one time and also has three smaller research groupings.
At any one time, the group will be researching on four to five different projects. Collaboration is very important and research is very much a team effort, as is publishing: all researchers' names will appear and articles routinely appear with around three to five names.
At the outset of any project, the dissemination strategy is carefully discussed and a publishing plan is prepared which includes:
- number of publications, e.g. five
- what journals to target, bearing in mind the strategic objectives of dissemination, e.g. some journals are good for the RAE, others will convey the message to practitioners
- who will be the lead author, responsible for coordinating the efforts of other authors and having their name first.
Reference
Hyman, M. (1990), "Unbounded collaboration: a way to broaden and improve marketing theory", in Lichtenthanl et al. (Eds), AMA Winter Educators' Conference Proceedings,American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL.