Researching an authorial collaboration: reflections on writing a journal article

Abstract

A crucial dimension of an effective research collaboration is the capacity to co-author publications arising from the research. Yet collaborative writing is as challenging as collaborative research, entailing complex processes of dialogue and shared meaning-making. This chapter explores the authors’ ongoing writing collaboration, and the positive outcomes arising from it, as encapsulating one viable approach to creating and sustaining a productive research team. This argument is elaborated by means of separate and shared reflections on the composition of the group’s first journal article (Arden, Danaher, & Tyler, 2005). These reflections yield important findings about the values and concepts underpinning the collaboration as well as specific strategies for writing and publishing consistent with those values and concepts. In particular, the authors’ interpersonal relations constitute a resilient framework for sharing prior knowledge and for articulating areas of convergence and divergence in their respective conceptual, methodological and empirical priorities.