Components and Indicators of Scientific Collaboration among Researchers: Developing and Determining the Factor Structure

The purpose of this research was to develop, validate and make the scientific collaboration scale and evaluation scientific collaboration reliable among researchers affiliated to Ferdowsi university of Mashhad. In this regard, it has applied a descriptive method. The statistical population included experts in the field of scientific collaboration and the researchers’ community of Ferdowsi University including faculty members and PhD students in the 2014-2015 scientific year. 7 people were selected by purposive sampling from the experts’ community and 228 people by random stratified sampling from the researchers’ community. With regards to the research objective and by identifying the overlaps in the resources and semi-structured interviews with experts, the components and indicators of scientific collaboration were extracted and scientific collaboration scale was formulated. Content validity and structure validity were confirmed using content validity ratio and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The reliability was obtained 0/88 using Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the total scale. Finally, the scale was developed with 5 factors including "contribution to the joint scientific production", "Participation in the scientific community", "collaboration in the research process", "emotional and cognitive readiness" and "the readiness of behavioral in scientific collaboration". The results indicated that the level of the researchers’ scientific collaboration was intermediate and researchers’ attitude toward scientific collaboration was positive. Also, there is a significant difference between the performance of scientific collaboration in terms of the faculty, academic level and gender. According to the validity and reliability, the scientific collaborations scale can be used in the studies to be conducted on scientific collaboration.