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This chapter explores specializations within academic librarian practices, focusing on librarian research and collaboration. Academic librarian roles are transitioning from service providers to specialists, researchers, and collaborators. Roles have shifted to incorporate interdisciplinary research and collaboration; embedded librarianship; research data management expertise; information literacy instruction; and core curriculum development. In order to understand this shift in roles, a mixed methods research project undertaken with a Purdue University researcher and Purdue Libraries faculty that prompted the development of a research diagrammatic metaphor modeling the components of librarian-faculty collaboration. The model demonstrates the dynamics and roles in academic collaboration and interdisciplinary research. A generalization of the model applied to two librarian-faculty collaboration scenarios exemplifies how these components facilitate engagement and project management. Potentially the model could be operationalized to understand disciplinary differences and provide a framework of accountability for both faculty and librarians engaged in research projects.

The purpose of this commentary is to complete the synthesis of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into Seven Commentaries on Service Research Themes developed by ServCollab and the Journal of Services Marketing. As an approach to achieving SDG #17, ServCollab’s collaborative logic and design perspective for collaboration services for sustainable development partnerships are presented.

Collaboration is ServCollab’s Service Research Theme #7, which reframes the UN SDG meta goal #17 of Partnerships. In prior ServCollab research, four possible human interactions were identified: conflict, competition, cooperation and collaboration. Only the shared purpose of collaboration enables elevating the human experience.

The authors found no published service research that studied SDG #17, which means there are huge opportunities for service research on the role of collaboration in service systems. The alignment between the UN SDGs and ServCollab’s goals is explored. A research agenda for service research and SDG goals was proposed for collaborative communications, collaborative technologies and collaborative projects.

Practical ideas are offered for serving humanity through collaboration. Collaborations are the only practical solutions to humanity’s myriad sustainable development problems.

When the United Nations developed its first 16 SDGs, they knew that accomplishing these goals required complex collaborations. That is why SDG #17 is Partnerships. ServCollab’s serving humanity logic applies collaboration to all social settings (large or small) where working together can sustain and regenerate the service ecosystem of Planet Earth.

This commentary describes a unique approach to building collaborative capacity for conducting service research projects for sustaining and regenerating the service ecosystem of Planet Earth.

The necessity for continuous advancement in library education and practice requires research collaboration among library professionals. This study aims to investigate research collaboration among lecturers in the department of library and information science (LIS) and librarians in university libraries in Nigeria.

A descriptive survey research design was used for the study. The quantitative study employed a close-ended questionnaire for data collection. The study covered all the librarians in academic libraries and lecturers in the department of LIS (LIS professionals) in public universities in Ekiti, Ondo and Osun States, Nigeria. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used for data analysis. The criterion mean of 2.50–2.99 was used for the research questions.

It was found that librarians in academic libraries and lecturers in Nigeria rarely engage in research collaboration. The reasons for the research collaboration are to increase the quality of research in the library profession, make research in the library profession more in-depth and cross-fertilize ideas for generating novel insights.

It is the engagement of librarians in academic libraries and the lecturers in the LIS department in the exchange of knowledge at national and international levels through research collaboration that can enhance the quality of research that emanates from the library profession.

Promotion of the library profession requires the integrated effort of library professionals in academic libraries and lecturers in the department of LIS through research collaboration.

Promotion of the library profession requires the integrated effort of library professionals in academic libraries and lecturers in the department of LIS through research collaboration.

In this article, the authors explore the emotional dimension of the strategies that researchers carry out to foster collaboration within research groups in science.

The authors have carried out fieldwork based on semi-structured interviews with members of high-performance research groups, supported by the analysis of ethnographic observations in the local work contexts of several of these groups.

As a result, the authors start from the representations of the principal investigators interviewed about collaboration, as a dynamic between the individuals involved and the group, to describe two forms of leadership strategies: ego-centered or group. Hence, the authors highlight that the emotional work of IPs consists of combining both strategies by activating and deactivating affection, warmth and spontaneity in interactions. The authors conclude by reviewing the contributions and some potential lines of study.

The main contributions and conclusions must be regarded considering several limitations of our work. First, the authors have focused on high-performance groups, so it would be expected that the research groups that do not have the support of European Research Council (ERC) do not present the observed dynamics. Concerning the analysis, the authors have focused on the link between situational (personal interaction) and organizational scales. Although the authors have attended social factors that imply the structure and changes of the professional sector of science (Whitley, 2000, 2014), future publications will allow the authors to delve into relationships on a broader scale, associating collaboration patterns and discursive positions. The authors will focus on (1) roles and social profiles and (2) features of scientific culture and its recent configuration.

The authors affirm that the emotional field is key to understanding how groups and individuals respond to these profound changes. In their work, scientific professionals do not only act based on rational and instrumental criteria but also driven by habits, affective networks and inertia of their organizational cultures. In this paper, the authors provide theoretical and practical keys to understand the complexity that collaboration creates within research groups as a contradictory reality that consists of a constant movement of individuals and the group.

As many of the interviewees expressed, there are no adequate spaces to learn and reflect on leadership and collaboration in science. The authors are science workers who are responsible for imagining and deciding how the authors want their research groups to function. Institutions must ensure the means so that this task can be carried out. Hopefully, this article will contribute to this irrevocable project.

The authors’ aim is to understand how well-known groups operate in their field, with a high level of resources and productivity, in order to identify and promote cutting-edge strategies in different scientific branches. Moreover, the authors want to recognize the importance of institutional infrastructures. For this reason, giving them a place in the framework of management studies allows to submit this issue to public debate for a wide audience of social scientists. Moreover, this permits to inquire about cross-disciplinary subjects, such as social and organizational psychology, sociology of work, studies about science and management studies.

This paper aims to examine and compares the extent and types of research collaboration and their citation impact in selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa using co-authorship amongst countries as a proxy indicator.

The paper reports the findings of a bibliometric study of publications that were published by authors affiliated to Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, between 2000 and 2019 and indexed in the Web of Science’s (WoS) three citation indexes. The social network analysis technique was adopted to articulate collaborative partnerships between and amongst geographical regions. Correlational tests were conducted to gauge the relationship between the frequency and intensity of collaboration and the influence of collaboration on citation impact. The paper highlights the characteristics of country collaborations, the nature of collaboration and the corresponding research impact and relates the types of collaboration to citation impacts in each country.

The findings reveal that Nigeria and Kenya have had wider and stronger collaborations than Ethiopia, Ghana and Tanzania; the number of collaborating countries has continued to grow in the five countries’ research ecosystems; there are statistically significant relationships between collaboration and citation impact in each country; international collaboration has yielded the most number of citations, with the global North performing better than the South and regional countries; and that the number of citations for the countries more than doubles through research collaboration.

Co-authorship of publications has been faulted but remains the most reliable proxy indicator of research collaboration. The study of the five countries, though depicting patterns of collaboration in many sub-Saharan African countries, cannot be generalised to the entire region.

The current study has policy implications as far as decisions on research collaboration are concerned. Sub-Saharan African countries and indeed the developing countries may consider re-examining their emphasis on international collaboration to the neglect of domestic and regional collaboration. While the study supports international collaboration, it nevertheless recommends a three-tier collaboration, wherein international collaboration is juxtaposed with domestic and/or regional collaboration.

The study uses social network analysis of country collaboration in developing countries. The intensity and frequency of collaboration are examined in relation to research impact.

This study attempts to use a new source of data collection from open government data sets to identify potential academic social networks (ASNs) and defines their collaboration patterns. The purpose of this paper is to propose a direction that may advance our current understanding on how or why ASNs are formed or motivated and influence their research collaboration.

This study first reviews the open data sets in Taiwan, which is ranked as the first state in Global Open Data Index published by Open Knowledge Foundation to select the data sets that expose the government’s R&D activities. Then, based on the theory review of research collaboration, potential ASNs in those data sets are identified and are further generalized as various collaboration patterns. A research collaboration framework is used to present these patterns.

Project-based social networks, learning-based social networks and institution-based social networks are identified and linked to various collaboration patterns. Their collaboration mechanisms, e.g., team composition, motivation, relationship, measurement, and benefit-cost, are also discussed and compared.

In traditional, ASNs have usually been known as co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks due to the limitation of data collection. This study first identifies some ASNs that may be formed before co-authorship networks or co-inventorship networks are formally built-up, and may influence the outcomes of research collaborations. These information allow researchers to deeply dive into the structure of ASNs and resolve collaboration mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the collaboration strategies employed by collaborating small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) and university researchers for initiating and optimizing the process and outcome of R&D collaboration.

The paper is based upon a qualitative study of the total population of university departments and SMEs involved in collaborative research projects sponsored by a new governmental programme in Denmark, the aim of which was to build new R&D alliances between industry and universities.

The findings show how partners choose to pursue difference short‐ or long‐term strategies to optimize the process and outcome of university‐industry (UI) collaboration. Some collaborations were thus informed by a short‐term strategy aimed at achieving immediate R&D results. However, to a high extent, many SME partners relied upon a long‐term strategy aiming at developing UI relations beyond the immediate project and practical learning. A variety of shifting strategies shape researchers' decisions during UI collaborations, which thus convey different notions of success.

The findings of the present research point to the importance of taking the diverse reasons and micro strategies informing collaborative efforts into account when studying UI collaborations.

Different strategies may prove successful in optimizing the outcome of UI collaborations depending upon, e.g. partners' previous collaborative experiences. Policies should incorporate some openness towards the differential premises and reasons for UI collaboration.

Relatively little research has addressed the development of UI relationships from the micro‐level perspective of the discretionary decisions and strategies of collaborating researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to apply psychological contract theory to the study of faculty‐doctoral student collaborations.

Through a survey of 170 doctoral students, four types of psychological contracts were investigated and reliable measures of relationship quality were developed.

The results showed that the quality of collaborations differ significantly across the four contract types. In addition, quality of collaboration varied significantly across collaborations using different research methods (e.g. laboratory work, theory building) and disciplinary paradigms (i.e. high and low consensus). Several other factors conducive to enhanced evaluation of relationship quality were also identified, including similarity in research philosophy, perceived motives for being in the research collaboration, meeting frequency, and conflict resolution.

The present study is somewhat limited in its sample, which is drawn from one university from the student perspective using self‐report measures. Future research might benefit from matching student and faculty assessments of particular collaborations.

Insights from the analyses suggest that greater awareness of the contract‐making mechanisms that operate in graduate education can help improve the quality of student experiences in research collaborations.

The framework of psychological contracts offers a novel perspective in understanding the dynamics of faculty‐student relationships.

Researchers need to collaborate to address grand challenges such as climate change, poverty and sustainable food production. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the researchers in a globally distributed research program interact to move their research forward.

The authors interviewed 14 participants in the research program.

In spite of the spatial distribution of the researchers the output from the research program is predominantly collaborative; as much as 79 percent of the publications are co-authored by researchers from multiple countries. However, the researchers mostly work alone on their contributions to their joint work and spend minimal time interacting. This strategy of minimal interaction is punctuated by islands of intense interaction when they occasionally meet in person. Interaction feels natural, productive and satisfying to them when they are co-located but less so when they are distributed, probably because they experience technology-mediated interaction over a distance as somewhat impoverished. The interviewees mention that the minimal-interaction strategy incurs the risks of cracks in common ground and of misconstruing minimal interaction as lack of commitment. But the strategy is generally well-liked.

The experience of technology-mediated interaction as impoverished points to an explanation for the finding of less interaction in distributed than co-located research. It should be noted that the study is restricted to one research program.

By questioning widely touted recommendations for ongoing, regular and sustained interaction this study provides a fresh look at scientific collaboration.

The purpose of this research was to investigate how to measure the performance of research and technology collaborations and to subsequently improve the management of university‐industry collaborative projects.

Literature studies have been carried out on the performance measurement of collaborative relationships and this has been augmented by research involving interviews with 32 relevant stakeholders.

The study has allowed a new performance measurement tool to be developed that is based on a conceptual model of research collaboration as a transformation process. This process incorporates the key findings from the literature and empirical studies, namely the need for technical, project, business and social inputs as well as knowledge and sustainability process outputs.

The research focuses on university‐industry collaborations and although the performance tool may be applied to other forms of collaboration, there may be elements specific to the application under investigation.

The new performance measurement tool can be used by academic faculty and professional services staff within universities to improve the management of research collaborations as well as by industry to help manage collaborations with universities. Both types of organisation can use the tool to help inform business and technical strategy.

The performance tool incorporates key requirements identified in the literature together with the findings from a consultation with a diverse group of highly experienced stakeholders; therefore, it provides a rigorous assessment of the issues and requirements for the management of research collaborations.