Good Partners are Hard to Find: The Search for and Selection of Collaborators in the Health Sciences

Choosing the most appropriate collaborators is becoming increasingly crucial to biomedical research as many research questions evolve into complex and multidisciplinary projects. Despite a growing emphasis on translational and interdisciplinary research, little is known about how biomedical researchers form collaborations. We conducted 27 semistructured interviews with scientists from the University of Pittsburgh, used grounded theory methodology to identify major themes, and compared these themes to the literature in order to develop a model of how biomedical researchers establish collaborations. We identify and discuss four major aspects of collaboration: motivation for collaboration, evaluation of prospective collaboration partners, search and selection, and barriers to collaboration formation.