In today’s challenge, we’ll share another way to increase your impacts beyond the Internet: co-authoring with a diverse group of colleagues.

Co-authoring is becoming increasingly common in many fields, for good reason: co-authoring “makes research more fun, productive, and efficient,” helps researchers “develop new ideas, extend our methodological toolkit, and share the workload,” allows senior researchers to share their expertise with younger scientists, and results in papers that some say contain stronger ideas and writing.

Co-authorship is also about bringing your own expertise to the table. Working with diverse co-authors can gain you a wider network of colleagues and increased connections in your field. And, if it’s done well, it secure you important allies at all career stages. After all, you never know where your grad students or postdocs will end up some day!

Plus, when you publish with a broad group of people, you help break down the “old boys network” while increasing the reach of your work — citation counts are higher for papers with gender and ethnically diverse co-authors.

Let’s learn more about what types of co-authors you can recruit a more diverse group of collaborators, how to work well with others, and some of the benefits and drawbacks of co-authorship in general.

What to look for in a co-author

In general, there are some things you should look for when recruiting co-authors outside of your own research group:

Complementary strengths

Are your potential collaborators excellent on theory, whereas you’re the computational methods wiz? Does a postdoc in your group know the ins and outs of R, while a PhD student you mentor can bang out a top-rate literature review in 24 hours? Having collaborators who possess complementary strengths to your own can make it easy to divide and conquer writing a better paper in less time.

Philosophy

Does this person respond to emails in a timely manner and deliver on promises? Knowing up front when you can count on someone takes a lot of the headaches out of collaboration.

And does this person’s working style jive well with your own? C. Titus Brown points out that he often ends up collaborating with others who aren’t big on computational biology, but that their shared, relaxed approach to writing is what makes their partnerships successful.

Challenge

Good co-authors are also those who challenge you to do your best work. Researcher Bob Hinings describes his best and longest-lasting collaborator thusly: “[I find] that other people are interesting and usually have better ideas than I do so I can build on their contributions and get great satisfaction from the process, even though at times it can be challenging. Royston is always full of ideas and it is a challenge to keep up with him.”

Collaborators with these characteristics can be found not only in your lab or university, but in other countries, different disciplines, and at many stages of their career. Let’s now dive into some ways you can look to diversify your group of collaborators.

Types of co-author diversity

Career stage

You can choose to co-author with scholars of your same career stage, more senior scholars, or with scholars who are junior to you. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, as CrookedTimber blog documents:

It is important for a junior scholar to show clearly his or her distinct contributions to a field and by co-authoring with senior scholars, some will be inclined to dismiss the work as that of the senior researcher…[When working with students] the junior scholar becomes the senior author due to his or her seniority as compared to the student co-author(s).

Co-authoring with junior scientists allows you to also mentor those with less experience. Consider giving full co-authorship credit to students who’ve helped on a project, rather than relegating their credit to the Acknowledgement section of your paper. It’s an easy way to diversify your co-author list while giving students a major leg-up.

That said, don’t make someone an author just to be nice. Respect the norms for your field and its written ethical guidelines. Many junior scholars bring their own strengths to the table. Ask them to take the lead on recording a video abstract, blogging about your study, or drafting a press release–your paper may be stronger for it!

Discipline

There are many good reasons to co-author with scientists from outside of your field (and even outside of academia): they can help your work reach different audiences, give an outside perspective on your field of study, and find ways to apply research in a clinical setting, among others.

For example, studies on sustainability science and data curation by hydrologist Praveen Kumar and information scientists Beth Plale and Margaret Hedstrom have been published from different perspectives in different venues. (Their work was both presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in 2013 and published in the International Journal of Digital Curation.) Some may worry that this constitutes “double dipping” (publishing the same work twice) but if done properly, the focus and content of the two products are very different and get disciplinary information to their communities of interest.

And as the Dean of Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions points out, collaboration can move research into practice, developing clinical technology and saving lives.

Gender & ethnic diversity

National Cancer Institute’s Kenneth Gibbs Jr eloquently explains the argument for diverse research teams on the Voices blog:

[W]hen trying to solve complex problems (i.e., the sort of thing scientists are paid to do), progress often results from diverse perspectives. That is, the ability to see the problem differently, not simply “being smart,” often is the key to a breakthrough. As a result, when groups of intelligent individuals are working to solve hard problems, the diversity of the problem solvers matters more than their individual ability. Thus, diversity is not distinct from enhancing overall quality—it is integral to achieving it.

And the literature backs him up: one recent study has found that gender diversity on research teams leads to better quality publications. Another study found that ethnically diverse teams are more creative and produce higher quality ideas than ethnically homogeneous groups (albeit among a sample population of undergraduates). Papers with ethnically diverse co-authors also tend to get more citations, too.

But perhaps the best argument for having a gender- and ethnically-diverse group of collaborators is summed up in this tweet:

If you only work with people who are like you, your work will only be FOR people like you. Embrace diversity, even if it’s hard #opencon2014

— Penny Andrews (@pennyb) November 16, 2014

Output

A final way to consider diversity is in the context of research outputs. You can “co-author” not only journal articles, but also presentations, software, and other types of research outputs.

Impactstory co-founder Heather Piwowar once found a diverse group of collaborators by putting out a call on Twitter for others interested in organizing a panel for the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in 2011. The panel was fun, very successful, and allowed her to work with a more diverse group of researchers than she had anticipated.

And collaborators on genomics researcher Holly Bik’s Phinch project are industry software developers, not other researchers, which has led to the development of a beautiful data visualization app for large biological datasets.

So how do you find diverse co-authors? Let’s explore some strategies.

How to find diverse co-authors

Mentors

Communications researcher Philip N. Howard suggests tapping your mentors for co-authorship opportunities:

The first step in finding opportunities to co-publish is to let your faculty mentors know that you are available to help if they ever get such invitations. Faculty sometimes receive unsolicited invitations to write an article or contribute a book chapter. Since faculty often plan long-term writing agendas, they may decline an unexpected invitation. They may be more likely to accept such an invitation if they know they can share the research and writing tasks with a co-author.

Mentors may also be able to connect you with colleagues who are interested in a similar subject who might be in need of a collaborator with whatever skills you possess (computational methods, quick-but-thorough literature review writing, mastery of Stata, and so on).

Conference buddies

Remember all those interesting researchers whose work you admire that you met while hustling at conferences? They can make great collaborators. Shoot them an email to say hello, and share an idea or two you’ve been thinking on to see if they want to collaborate.

Social networks

Take a look at your social networks on Twitter, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn. After being on social media for a few weeks or months you’ll have met scientists in your network whose skills complement your own. Don’t be afraid to reach out to potential co-authors with an idea for a paper or project.

Cold-call

The final–and most challenging–way to find co-authors is to “cold call” a researcher that you want to collaborate with but haven’t met yet. Reach out to them via email or phone, send them an idea for a paper or two, and ask if they’d like to collaborate.

As a PhD student, Impactstory co-founder Jason Priem once emailed a researcher he admired with a request to co-author, offering to do the grunt work of writing a literature review. He was accepted onto the paper and now has a co-authorship credit with a respected researcher, broadening his co-authorship base and experience.

If you’ve got something to offer–a great idea, a complementary skill, or the ability to do something the lead author doesn’t want to do–you can find opportunities that aren’t readily apparent.

Making co-authorship work

So–you’ve got your co-authors lined up and ready to write. Now what?

Tseen Khoo of the Research Whisperer blog says all of the following are required for a successful co-authoring experience:

• A feasible, agreed-upon schedule for drafting and deadline for completion.
• A strong leader for the paper, someone who takes final responsibility for its proofing and submission (even though the actual tasks may be devolved to someone else…).
• Proper version control. That’s why I emphasise the serial process of sending it around the team. When X has done their bit, they send it to Y (cc’ing the others), who then sends it to Z (cc’ing the others). Don’t fiddle with the writing till you are the one the document is sent to.
• All members of the team to be committed to adding value to the publication, and doing their bit.

In the next section, we discuss co-author agreements, which can help you articulate the schedule and responsibilities that Tseen describes. Version control can be managed via email and Microsoft Word as described above, or by writing your paper on GitHub, WriteLaTeX, or Authorea.

Be sure to also avoid gift and ghost authorship (the practice of giving authorship credit to people who didn’t contribute to the paper)–both are still practiced by some academics but are heavily frowned upon by publishers.

The tricky bits

There’s no shortage of screeds that outline the many potential drawbacks to co-authoring papers:

• Personality conflicts can lead to blocked revisions and other stonewalling of papers prior to publication
• Excessive publishing with senior researchers can be seen as riding others’ coattails and reflect poorly upon junior faculty in some cases
• Sticky political situations can arise when unresponsive co-authors won’t approve a publication prior to submission
• A lack of granular credit for authorship makes it hard for each co-author to get due credit
• Some people work better alone than in groups

Credit for authorship is starting to see some progress: some journals require specific articulation of author contributions (like this statement for this paper) and the recently released CRediT taxonomy may fix this problem altogether, once widely adopted.

And it may sound hokey, but the near-magical fix for most of these problems is simple: create a co-author agreement that puts into writing the roles, division of labor, and a set of standards that everyone will agree to abide by (like “responding to an email within 48 hours”, and so on). Elsevier Connect blog has posted a co-author agreement template, if you want to give it a try.

Co-authorship agreements are generally not legally-binding contracts, but instead ways for everyone to clarify the “rules of engagement” before a major writing project begins.

Homework

Brainstorm ideas for writing projects and a list of potential co-authors. If you want, you can divide the list into “low hanging fruit” and “dream co-authors” to make it easier to write.

If you’ve got the bandwidth to take on a new writing project right now, reach out to your potential co-authors in one of the ways described above and propose a collaboration. Otherwise, keep your list handy for a rainy day, when you’ll have the time to take on a new project.

And if you don’t have a diverse network of colleagues on your scholarly social media sites, you can start to fix that right now–start following 10 new people today.