Collaboration and INterdisciplinarity Resources

a "textbook" reading

Consider the issue of scientific collaboration, sometimes with industry, and the various challenges which tend to come along with that sort of work—in addition to other forms of interdisciplinary interaction. This "textbook" reading will be a chapter from a 2005 NAS report on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. The selected chapter details some historically very successful collaborative enterprises—some with industry, and others at various National Research Laboratories.

Click here to access the assigned "textbook" reading (chapter 3 of the 2005 NAS report mentioned above). Note that you can visit the National Academies Press (NAP) website for full copies of this and any other NAS report.

associated articles

The University of Utah was the site of a rather "explosive" and now infamous interdisciplinary collaboration between the chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. These chemists rocked the world of both chemists and physicists when they announced, on March 23rd of 1989, that they had produced what is now commonly known as a "cold fusion" reaction.

Interdisciplinary forays into other scientific domains have the potential to offer collaborators great promise: that of applying unexpected ideas to as-yet-unsolved problems; or bringing new methods to old puzzles; or making exciting discoveries in territories which many others have already tread, but to no avail. However, these interdisciplinary ventures can also be risky—as practitioners travel into terrain for which they don't necessarily have the usual map.

In 2019, Nature published a pair of interesting pieces which revisited the Pons & Fleischmann moment, along with (setting aside the 1989 debacle) the general matter of the scientific feasibility of cold fusion. Click here to read Philip Ball's editorial summarizing the initial case as well as the revisit. Click here to read about one secretive, collaborative attempt to see if there's anything worth taking seriously about cold fusion—despite its tarnished reputation.

News & REPORTS

Collaboration usually means co-authorship, which itself comes with unique challenges of various kinds. You need to consider not just how good the ideas, methods, and resources of a potential collaborator and co-author seem, but also how well you might work together and whether or not you can trust them. Click here to read a rather sad story, written in 2006 by Lila Guterman for The Chronicle of Higher Education, about uncertain responsibility in scientific authorship and taint by association with scientific fraud.

And in any sort of collaboration—interdisciplinary, or not—if you see something going drastically and morally wrong, yet internal recourse fails, then you should have some idea about other, external sources of redress. In other words: you should know how to "blow the whistle," if you have to. Click here to read Nature's (2013) presentation of three different approaches to three different whistle-blowing cases—along with tips about how to "blow the whistle" most effectively, when you need to.