When I think of collaboration, the first thing that comes to my mind is music. When I was in high school, *NSYNC (don’t forget the asterisk) was the bee’s knees. A few years later, they broke up and each member went his way. Justin Timberlake went on to be a Grammy-winning and billboard-topping solo artist, while JC Chasez went on to…you be the judge of his post-*NSYNC career. As a group, *NSYNC was powerful. Disbanded, minus Justin, they are nothing. This demonstrates the pros and cons of collaboration. For some people—Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins—their solo careers are successful arguably because of the group that supported them, the group they first collaborated with. It could also be argued that the group carries a completely different identity to the person who would have been successful on his or her own (Chris Cornell, Jack White). However, other artists burn and peel after collaboration has ended. Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins), Scott Weiland (from Stone Temple Pilots), and Scott Stapp (from Creed) were much more successful with their group than their solo careers.

Does correlation help and hurt people, or is it an arbitrary argument? The question reflects other ideas about correlation, namely identity. Hyde et al discusses the nature of the “node” that produces something. What is the degree of someone’s control over how the negatively- or positively-generated benefits of a product affect that person as they collaborated with a group? Essentially, when someone collaborates, he or she adopts in part another identity. Could someone who was temporarily identified as a “group” end up competing against themselves as they assume their individual identity? The reason I pose this question is because I’ve been thinking about strategies in publishing. Would I as someone who wants to publish with professors be hurt in the future because I can’t produce anything at the level of the collaboration? Or would it propel me further than my own efforts? In other words, the immediate impulse grad students have is to jump on any publishing opportunity with a professor, an impulse that I would for sure respond to positively (*wink wink Dr. Markmann*). In fact, as students we are taught to take these kinds of opportunities. But could this backfire? Would you then be expected to publish at this level, or produce something better? Or what if what you were producing with a professor was based on precepts or research that you actually disagreed with?