For each young scholar, academic research is a rather daunting task. You need a certain set of skills for academic research, but you’ll only develop them over time. There are huge benefits in collaboration for academic research: you share the workload and get to explore several research methods. But even for a scholar that’s been around for a while, collaboration with other scholars is a huge advantage. In fact, most academic research is done in collaboration.
Find a partner
A classic approach to collaboration for academic research ist, if you simply found a partner who has a vested interest in your research topic. You could be a student at one university and have a friend at another university who’s as keen on researching the microbiological effects of genetically modified foods on human intestines. It’s just an example. But you could be a student of microbiology and your friend might be a medical student or even a doctorate student. Together you could tackle the academic research while each of you receives more or less equal workload within his area of expertise. If there’s a lot of statistics involved, you could add a third scholar to your team who’s more versed with that stuff. It saves you a lot of time which you can spend in your area. However, there might be travel involved.
Alternatively, such a collaboration might also be initiated by two research groups of different departments within the same institution. However, with these types of collaboration, you usually have no funding. Moreover, you have to meet regularly to compare notes and somehow create a paper with current findings.
Privately initiated research
Private companies often maintain a relationship with various faculty members. That faculty member has his or her own group of researchers – the typical students. This kind of research usually is funded. Students are allowed to research under the watchful eye of their lecturer. It’s especially helpful just to learn how academic research is done. On the side, you can explore various research methods and be part of solving a potentially important issue. Remember, academic research is always done to solve problems of our current day. Just like with a personally initiated research with a friend or two, the group has to meet regularly. It’s usually split up into further subgroups. Each group receives a task to tackle. To set dates, the whole group has to meet and inform about their findings. You can imagine what chaos it is to actually write a paper about the research topic. One person needs to be appointed to write the research paper, maybe it’s even two. He or she then has to wait to receive the findings of each group to put them into the paper. Not all group members are on time and the workflow tends to get disrupted easily.
Federally funded research is always welcome
Yet another third way of collaboration for academic research is when a researcher has received federal funding for his research. It’s usually a smaller collaboration group. Most of the time, a professor from the faculty would receive federal funding for research and then choose a few of his former graduates to work with him. Though this kind of academic research is funded, the former grad students don’t always get that much of it. However, it serves them to further their research skills. Despite they’re under the supervision of their professor they’d be named on the research paper later on. This helps students to build credibility and thus, it’s a stepping stone for their career.
Even though federally funded academic research is usually done in smaller groups, it can still be a hassle to allocate all research results. The collaborators might not even be at the same faculty. Therefore, travels are a must to gather for meetings, share notes, and put it all together. Certainly, you can use video calls to ease the pressure of having to travel. Imagine, there was a blackout in one of the collaborator’s areas. His findings wouldn’t reach the professor at the agreed date – depending on when you sent the findings of your academic research part over.
Take your academic research online
You might probably be aware of specific scholarly platforms where you can access a treasure trove of scientific databases. That’s only one of the advantages. Flowcite, for example, offers a group collaboration tool for up to ten scholars. In real-time, you can add notes, highlight text and also track comments.
Imagine it as a kind of social media platform, though it focuses on actual academic research. Funny cat videos are not allowed there – you can share those in your own time on another platform. Like at social media networks, you can set up a group with all collaborators on one academic research topic. And yes, it even contains an editing tool as well as a PDF viewer. As soon as you start your academic research project, you’ll only have to add your collaborators. Instead of having to meet and share notes, you can add them all in one place. No one has to set up a document and wait for the next meeting to share and compare notes. Such tools make it so much easier to collaborate for academic research as everything is shared in real-time. It doesn’t even matter if you’re located within the same time zone. Everyone can add at any time when it’s suitable. However, you may still have collaborators who add notes rather late. That’s unfortunately a matter that cannot be solved by the best research management platform.
Academic research platforms are the answer to promoting collaboration
- You can use them for personal projects and group collaboration alike
- Share your personal PDF library of your academic research results with your peers with just one click
- Track each other’s comments on your research project
- Add notes and additional data any time
- View your research progress as PDF with all up to date notes
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Real-time effective academic research progress without the hassle of meetings and tons of separate documents to integrate
