Collaboration

          The scientific community collaborates to share information, generate new ideas, and repeat procedures to test the validity of the results. Collaboration requires each individual involved to take on a role and particular set of tasks, which allows the group to work more efficiently and effectively. I collaborated with other students during the semester when we peer reviewed each other’s papers. The peer revisions helped me gain a different point of view and understand what portions of my papers needed improvement and exactly how I could improve my writing. After looking at my own work for too long I lose the ability to identify problematic areas, but with peer revisions I gained a fresh perspective and used the feedback to revise my writings. Collaboration in the scientific community also involves peer review because teams of researchers must work together to report methods and results to the whole community in a clear manner that others can repeat. If researchers did not collaborate the scientific process would take much longer because studies produce large amounts of data that require analysis that may take a number of months. Effective collaboration involves the delegation of tasks to each individual and communication between each individual. When I collaborated with a committee during the research proposal adjudication process I noticed that our ability to split up the work and communicate with one another allowed us to finish the adjudications quicker than I had anticipated. As a committee we decided each member would adjudicate a certain number of proposals and choose the top proposal from that group of proposals. We communicated in an online forum before we met up to discuss and rank the top three proposals. Because we were able to communicate and divide the work effectively the process was relatively easy. After the collaboration I realized the reason our committee worked well together was that we each trusted one another to do adjudicate the proposals in a certain time frame and we respected each other’s opinions. Collaboration is specifically important in the scientific community because researchers often build on the ideas of previous researchers and are able to work together to enhance the research. Throughout the semester my peers and I used blogs to discuss topics pertaining to class material. In the blogs we collaborated on approaches to different assignments and discussed any problems we were having with assignments. Through my collaborations during peer reviews, the adjudication process, and the blogs I have gained a better understanding of the purposes and benefits of collaboration in science.

Research Proposal Adjudication