Few Words on Collaboration and Acknowledgement!

As a faculty member, I get numerous papers/reports to review from my UP/PG/PhD students. In these years I have made a couple of observations (these are my general views not necessarily applicable each and every individual) which I would like to share with you all. I hope it will be useful to my colleagues and students.

1.      Generally, our Indian students are good at an individual level but when they have to work in a team I feel they are shy on collaborating with other than their friends/project groups/dedicated guides. However, when the same students go abroad they seem to do pretty well in collaboration/team skill. So, the blame is not on students but on us. As a teaching fraternity, in my opinion, it is our responsibility to create such an environment and opportunities for students to develop team/collaboration skills.

2.   Another observation I have is about Acknowledgement. Most of the UP/PG Students never bother to acknowledge lab /office staff in their project reports/black books which is very surprising. At least in my filed (electronics, hardware related labs, etc) majority of the time lab- assistants are helping a lot to students right from PCB designing to fault finding. Once again, the blame is on us. We, teach fraternity, really need to address this issue and train our students appropriately. If we do not cultivate this right approach in our students they may fail on professional ethics at a later stage in their professional life. Collaboration and acknowledgement go hand in hand.

Now I would like to share one example of international collaboration and how people have been acknowledge in their efforts. The attached paper, “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC,” is a noble prize-winning work. Year 2013 Nobel Prize was given to Prof.Higgs and Prof. Englert based on this work. Now, see the attached paper where authorship is given to all collaborators (Can you guess how many collaborators are there ? more than 3000+). Now, check the collaborator names from page no 41 onwards, each and every engineer/scientists are acknowledged for their contribution.

We, as faculty fraternity, need to set such standards for us as well as for our students!  

On a side note, I would like to highlight that my Senior Colleague from IEEE Bombay Section Dr.B.Satyanaryana, TIFR, has also contributed to this project!

If interested you may download the full paper from here!