An increasingly prominent feature of 21st-century research is faculty members’ participation in collaborative research projects. Team science, (also called “convergent science” in some contexts) is used broadly to refer to collaborative (and increasingly cross-disciplinary) scholarship and translational efforts to develop evidence-based solutions to complex societal and global problems. The forms of collaborative scholarship vary across different fields including the natural and physical sciences, biomedicine, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and the arts and humanities.

Not all faculty members at UCI are engaged in team-based scholarship and this is certainly not a requirement for successful merit and promotion reviews. At the same time, because team-based cross-disciplinary research (sometimes involving partnerships between university faculty and community-based partners) is becoming an increasingly salient feature of contemporary research, UCI is strongly committed to creating an academic climate that facilitates and rewards faculty contributions to collaborative scholarship. Toward that goal, we encourage candidates for merit and promotion reviews to identify their specific contributions to collaborative scholarship and/or translation to community practice and public policy.

We developed a listing of some of the ways that faculty can contribute to team-based discovery and translation to practice. The suggested list of collaborative contributions is not exhaustive, and the ways that faculty contribute to team-based research may be field-specific. In any case, if you are participating in team research at UCI as well as projects in which you are collaborating with scholars from other universities and/or with community partners, please describe those contributions in your reflective research statement for merit or promotion review.

Also, as you complete the UC-AP-10 summary of your major publications for the current review period, please note your collaborative contributions when summarizing those publications that resulted from team-based projects.