37 - Beware the Serial Collaborator

Summary

Some time ago, I was contacted by a colleague in one of the University of Missouri’s (MU) “sister” universities in another country about a potential collaborative project. I had met this person a few years earlier when he had spent a semester on sabbatical at MU, and so agreed to the collaboration. The project involved data collection from participants from four developing countries that are not typically included in psychological research, and thus the study had the potential to make a unique contribution. He stated he would organize the data collection, which would not have been particularly difficult, if I designed the study and provided all of the materials to him. Once the study was under way, we were in regular e-mail contact during which he updated me on data collection in the various locations.

Several boxes of raw data from about 500 participants arrived the following semester. This considerable amount of data was coded, double-checked, and entered for analyses by research assistants in my lab. I was eager to see the results, given the unique populations, and so, once it was ready, I focused on analyzing the data. In some ways, the results were different than I had expected, but in other ways they were not different than we had found elsewhere. In any case, the results were what they were, and I proceeded to write up the manuscript for journal review. After a few rounds of review, the manuscript was accepted for publication. I had been contacted by a colleague a few months earlier for preprints in this area, which she wanted to include in a meta-analysis on this topic. So, a few weeks after the manuscript was in press, I sent her a copy and sent a copy to another colleague who had done a considerable amount of work on the topic.