Practical Collaboration Habits for Early-Career Researchers

• ▪️ Co-Define The Problem In Plain Language.
  
  Write a short problem statement together in everyday language, then add key discipline terms. Clear wording helps potential collaborators see where their expertise fits and reduces the risk that each group is quietly answering a different question.
• ▪️ Align Expectations Early.
  
  Talk explicitly about what success looks like for each person involved. Agree on likely outputs, authorship principles, realistic timelines, and responsibilities for methods, data management, and external communication. A few notes in a shared document are often enough.
  
• ▪️ Use Brief, Regular Check-Ins.
  
  Short, scheduled meetings often work better than rare, lengthy ones. A study of 11 interdisciplinary teams found that shared communication practices and informal meetings were linked to higher research productivity and greater team satisfaction.¹
  
• ▪️ Share Clear Materials, Not Just Ideas.
  
  Use concise shared documents, protocol summaries, and short method videos that collaborators can easily access. Clear write-ups combined with visual explanations help collaborators understand and reuse your approach, supporting more reproducible methods across labs and reducing training time. Video methods allow collaborators to revisit critical steps on their own schedule, which is especially helpful for global teams.

Even as an early-career researcher, you can suggest these simple structures at the start of a project; a clear problem statement, agreed roles, and shared visual methods can make collaborations feel more professional and more manageable for everyone.

To see how an experienced scientist uses video methods to support collaboration, visibility, and reproducibility, join our 19 March webinar, Publish for Impact: Video Articles to Boost Visibility and Citations, with Donald E. Ingber, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Founding Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

He’ll share practical strategies for using video articles, along with a brief walkthrough of JoVE’s publishing process.

1. Morgan, S. E., Ahn, S., Mosser, A., et al. (2021). The effect of team communication behaviors and processes on interdisciplinary teams’ research productivity and team satisfaction. Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 24, 83–110. https://doi.org/10.28945/4857