Scientific Collaboration and the Chicken and Egg Enigma. (June 20, 2013)

Michael Weale has been a Senior Lecturer in Statistical Genetics at King’s College London since 2007. He received a PhD in Population Genetics from Southampton University in 1992, and later retrained in statistics, obtaining an MSc in Biometry.

Dr Weale seems to be a man of few but pithy words.

Jonathan Adams' analysis cannot distinguish whether scientists collaborate internationally because they are successful, or whether they are successful because they collaborate internationally (Nature 497, 557–560; 2013).

If it is the former, then any government initiative to promote collaboration for its own sake risks simply degrading the correlation between collaboration and success, rather than improving the quality of scientific output. Impact factors and publication rates are arguably imperfect estimators of past success, and insecure guides to future success.