Strategies For Team Science Success

Collaborations that integrate diverse perspectives are critical to addressing many of our complex scientific and societal problems. Yet those engaged in cross-disciplinary team science often face institutional barriers and collaborative challenges. Strategies for Team Science Success offers readers a comprehensive set of actionable strategies for reducing barriers and overcoming challenges and includes practical guidance for how to implement effective team science practices. More than 100 experts--including scientists, administrators, and funders from a wide range of disciplines and professions-- explain evidence-based principles, highlight state-of the-art strategies, tools, and resources, and share first-person accounts of how they’ve applied them in their own successful team science initiatives. While many examples draw from cross-disciplinary team science initiatives in the health domain, the handbook is designed to be useful across all areas of science. Strategies for Team Science Success will inspire and enable readers to embrace cross-disciplinary team science, by articulating its value for accelerating scientific progress, and by providing practical strategies for success. Scientists, administrators, funders, and others engaged in team science will also leave equipped to develop new policies and practices needed to keep pace in our rapidly changing scientific landscape. Scholars across the Science of Team Science (SciTS), management, organizational, behavioral and social sciences, public health, philosophy, and information technology, among other areas of scholarship, will find inspiration for new research directions to continue advancing cross-disciplinary team science.

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research. The growing scale of science has been accompanied by a shift toward collaborative research, referred to as "team science." Scientific research is increasingly conducted by small teams and larger groups rather than individual investigators, but the challenges of collaboration can slow these teams' progress in achieving their scientific goals. How does a team-based approach work, and how can universities and research institutions support teams? Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science synthesizes and integrates the available research to provide guidance on assembling the science team; leadership, education and professional development for science teams and groups. It also examines institutional and organizational structures and policies to support science teams and identifies areas where further research is needed to help science teams and groups achieve their scientific and translational goals. This report offers major public policy recommendations for science research agencies and policymakers, as well as recommendations for individual scientists, disciplinary associations, and research universities. Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science will be of interest to university research administrators, team science leaders, science faculty, and graduate and postdoctoral students.

Why collaborations in STEM fields succeed or fail and how to ensure success Once upon a time, it was the lone scientist who achieved brilliant breakthroughs. No longer. Today, science is done in teams of as many as hundreds of researchers who may be scattered across continents. These collaborations can be powerful, but they also demand new ways of thinking. The Strength in Numbers illuminates the nascent science of team science by synthesizing the results of the most far-reaching study to date on collaboration among university scientists. Drawing on a national survey with responses from researchers at more than one hundred universities, archival data, and extensive interviews with scientists and engineers in over a dozen STEM disciplines, Barry Bozeman and Jan Youtie establish a framework for characterizing different collaborations and their outcomes, and lay out what they have found to be the gold-standard approach: consultative collaboration management. The Strength in Numbers is an indispensable guide for scientists interested in maximizing collaborative success.

In recent years there has been a huge rise in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in animal sciences which has accelerated improvements in animal welfare. Down to earth and practical, this book gives guidance on how cross-disciplinary research can advance animal welfare. The aim of the book is to help researchers and graduate animal science students to understand how to advance animal welfare through the integration of disciplines.

There has never been a better time to for a handbook focused on women in science. In May 2016, the American Association for the Advancement of Science posted an article titled “We need to do more for women in science.” This book describes the importance of carving out spaces for women in science and includes the unique strengths of women scientists as well as challenges they tend to face. Studies of women leadership consistently illustrate that women demonstrate strengths in leadership across communities and have skills in bringing together groups towards a common goal. The role of women in context is an important one in science, but has not been the focus of previous texts about careers in science or medicine. This first of its kind book develops an understanding of research careers occurring within a greater community of colleagues and academicians as well as the fact that women themselves lead within a group, a community, and a context. The book focuses on women who are pursuing research careers in academic medicine with specific emphasis on women in science and research as well as lessons learned from fellow female scientists. It also provides key strategies and skills centered on the social ecological model as well as a sense of community with other women scientists. The book is organized thematically using the social ecological model as a framework in which we all live and complete our work. Women Rock Science is a valuable resource that can be used in a variety of settings. It is beneficial for University classes as well as lab group meetings. It also places an emphasis on community and can be shared with one’s community of mentors, mentees and colleagues.

Solutions to societal and organizational problems require people from diverse fields of expertise to effectively work in team-based, collaborative environments. To create these environments, we need to address a myth in modern culture that people have natural abilities to collaborate and work together. Collaboration and teamwork are skills. As such, these skills need to be learned and practiced. Commonly, collaboration is learned through trial and error. Team members have little or no training in how to effectively and efficiently harness the diversity of strengths among team members and maximize their contributions to the team. The purpose of this book is to provide a practical, process-oriented guide that, at its most fundamental level, is about building relationships and promoting communication and learning among diverse groups of individuals that results in creative, collaborative, and inclusive problem-solving environments. This volume provides explicit approaches and processes that will help team members more effectively and efficiently create new knowledge and solutions for societal and organizational problems through collective action.

This expansive Handbook guides readers through a multi-layered landscape of the interpretations and uses of transdisciplinary thinking and practices worldwide. It advances understanding of the strengths and limits of transdisciplinary research in the context of societal power relations, institutional structures and social inequalities. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

A narrative guide to help scientists improve their collaboration techniques and build trusting relationships with their research teams. The days of scientists conducting solitary inquiries in isolated labs are effectively over, with most researchers instead collaborating in cross-functional teams. In addition to mastering the technical skills necessary in their respective fields, scientists must now learn strategies for better communication and relationship building to succeed in reaching increasingly sophisticated and interdisciplinary research goals. In Scientific Collaboration, biosecurity researcher and animal disease ecologist Jeanne M. Fair shares exciting--and occasionally cringeworthy--stories of scientists working together as an approachable way to introduce and explain the principles crucial to effective scientific collaboration. From the global community of scientists measuring sea ice decline to cooperative private-public sector investigations of harrowing virus outbreaks, the real-life experiences provide examples of and insights into how scientists rise to meet challenges together. Fair highlights principles for fostering community, integrity, loyalty, communication, and compassion among teams. Scientists can adopt and apply these principles to research collaborations to improve communication and trust among their team members, all while working toward the common goal of discovery. Covering multidisciplinary research teams that have led to transformational breakthroughs as well as stories of hurdles and tough lessons learned, Scientific Collaboration provides a foundation for increasing research productivity while bringing more fun and joy into the collaborative process. This book will appeal to any scientists and team leaders who need to function in this new scientific world, wherein the most important breakthroughs happen through cooperation, combined effort, and mutual trust.