Benefits, Motivations, and Challenges of International Collaborative Research: A Sociology of Science Case Study

Contemporary science is marked by expanding, diverse forms of teamwork. Collaboration across organizational and cultural boundaries extends the possibilities of discovery. International collaborative research projects can provide findings beyond what one team could achieve alone. Motivated to grow their scientific network and maintain existing relationships, researchers increasingly collaborate, despite often unrecognized costs, since such projects are challenging to manage and carry out. Rarely studied in-depth and longitudinally, researcher perspectives are crucial to better understand the dynamics of durable collaboration networks. Thus, this retrospective, longitudinal case study of a sociology of science project applies the novel method of autoethnography to examine teamwork benefits, motivations, and challenges. Key challenges found include spatial distance and differences of culture, language, and career stage. This study, spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, focused on collaborators’ characteristics and evolving perceptions of team dynamics over a decade.