Qualitative Study of Researcher Strategies in Forming Productive Research Collaborations

Objectives: To identify strategies used by biomedical researchers to form productive research collaborations and develop hypotheses about factors that might influence researcher's choice of collaborator selection strategy. Design: Qualitative study using in-depth interviews. Setting: A major research university in the Northeast US. Participants: 21 health researchers from the disciplines of dental medicine, pharmacy, public health, nursing and medicine. Methods: Semistructured interviews lasting 45 to 60 minutes each. Interview questions were of two types: information gathering and strategy elicitation. Information gathering questions combined with review of formal documents (e.g. vitas, departmental web pages and publication records) provided the basis for a profile of each subject. Strategy elicitation questions asked subjects to describe the formation and outcomes of specific collaborations. In analysis of the interview notes collaboration examples were identified and categorized. Results: Initial findings suggest that collaboration formation strategies can be characterized in terms of the triggering event, active vs. passive, breadth of search, use of third parties for recommendations, and use of published literature. The nature of researcher collaboration formation strategies differs depending on their field of study, tenure in the field, tenure at the institution, and the availability of local resources. Conclusion: This study suggests that biomedical researchers have a wide variety of strategies for forming collaborations, variation that should be taken into account when creating infrastructures and program to enhance research effectiveness and productivity. Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics (CCTI) of the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Research Institute (1 U54RR023506-01)