Research collaboration: educational research and wider contexts

Collaboration is the social dimension of scientific inquiry. Research collaboration is a field of academic research containing scientific and increasingly commercialized dimensions. This narrative analysis investigates questions about authorship and motivation. Aside from educational research, wider research collaboration literature is dominated by a focus on ‘hard’ sciences. Unresolved are ethical issues regarding the integrity of knowledge contribution claims listed on journal publications. Despite modest recognition by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), scientific naming protocols on published journal articles inevitably shape, rightly or wrongly, the status strength of authors’ symbolic capital and ranking as well as permit departments to submit each named author to the UK’s REF, thereby gaining the benefits of additional monetary and scientific capital accumulation.