Yesterday, I wrote about the types of collaboration we commonly observe in science. Today, I want to spend 5 minutes thinking about what happens when you write a science paper alone.

Benefits:

• New projects can emerge and die quickly.
• You set your own standards.
• You increase your range of skills by having to do all of the work.

Pitfalls:

• It takes slighly longer to write a paper alone since you cannot share the workload.
• The feedback loop is slow: you can waste months or years without anyone telling you how stupid you are.
• It is easier to go unnoticed when you work alone.

I believe that you can alleviate some of the pitfalls:

• Do experimental work early and often. Nature is the best coauthor.
• Read a lot and keep an open mind. Do not become overspecialized.
• Manage your time tightly.
• Make your work widely available.

Scientists collaborate frequently. Most science articles have at least two authors.

Some collaborations work well, others fail. The first step to understanding what went wrong is to categorize the collaboration. I distinguish three types:

• Hierarchical collaboration: the student collaborates with his supervisor, the researcher collaborates with his manager. This form of collaboration is usually long-lived. It usually depends on the available funding and is usually more conservative in nature. The lower you are in the hierarchy, the more you work, usually.
• Symmetric collaboration: two mathematicians write papers by exchanging conjectures over email. This form of collaboration does not scale well to large numbers: the communication overhead grows quadratically.
• Topical collaboration: a philosopher writes a paper with a software engineer to describe the philosophy of software engineering. This form of collaboration can suffer from communication problems. The collaboration is usually project-centered. It might be risky research. I would expect this form of collaboration to be especially fruitful. Oddly enough, I cannot think of any famous example of topical collaboration in science.

See also The lonely researcher: a loser?

Nicholas Carr asked whether IT departments mattered. What is IT all about? e-Collaboration, e-Mail, e-Learning, e-Health, e-Business, and so on. Does the “e-” matter?

I am working on a graduate program in e-collaboration. At
some point, I had to stop and think… isn’t all collaboration
electronic? Even the construction workers use cell phones and PDAs.

Does anyone seriously sick fails to look their disease on Wikipedia, and enter related posting boards to meet other people who have the same disease?

Do you know any student who fail to use the Web to help them in their classes?

Do you know any business that is not also an e-Business? Even the shops at my local market have computers on their stands so that you can pay with a debit card.

Source: This idea came in an e-discussion with Daniel Tunkelang.

From the lowly Ph.D. student at a small school, to the Havard professor, researchers are blogging. Here are some of the reasons why they blog:

• Research is a social activity. Blogging allows us to keep and create links with diverse researchers whose varied interests keeps our mind open and fresh.
• Blogging is a personal activity, whereas most of science is consensual. Hence, blogging helps to promote ideas that would not survive otherwise. It is easier to go against the grain in a blog then in a research journal.

My thesis is that blogging will ultimately be recognized as an activity encouraging true innovation.

References:

• Julia Davies, Guy Merchant, Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as a New Literacy, 2006.
• Gerard Goggin, Public intellectuals in the Internet age, 2007.

Most research papers are boring. They rehash existing work with almost no new insight. Mihai Pătraşcu blamed me for saying that big conferences were for people without imagination: what I actually wrote was that focusing on prestigious conferences tends to encourage self-reinforcing biases. The recipe is simple: a senior researcher defines whatever he does as “the right way,” the young researchers follow the senior researcher for selfish reasons, and finally, the community grows and whoever questions it is rejected. Surely, 10,000 bright people cannot be wrong? We invested millions of dollars into this field, surely, it cannot be wrong? Eventually, you get a catastrophe like classical AI or String theory. These fields are not bad in themselves, but they grab most of the attention and most of the funding for long periods of time. In effect, they work to prevent any competition from rising up. Any good gardener knows better: monolithic cultures are weak, you need a diverse set of plants.

Science should be about fostering competing ideas. You should wish that many people will challenge your ideas. I believe that we should encourage diversity and true innovation.

Paul Graham tells us Why There Aren’t More Googles. Let me revisit his essay with my concern for the lack of scientific breakthroughs:

And yet it’s the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns. Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it. And yet most program committees are driven by consensus. The biggest factor determining how a program committee will feel about your research idea is how other researchers feel about it. I doubt they realize it, but this algorithm guarantees they’ll miss all the very best ideas. The more people who have to like a new idea, the more outliers you lose.

I challenge program committees: the list of accepted paper should be diverse. If you see strong clusters of similar ideas, and most prestigious conferences have them, then you have failed to foster the next scientific breakthrough.

You may object: surely, if an idea is any good, it will survive rejection by a program committee or two? Of course it will, but if you did not encourage crazy research, it may come much later.