You have research ideas of your own. Find the people to work on them with.
Introducing Co-author on RA Commons: a place to pitch a question, find collaborators and build a research project together.
As a young researcher such as research assistants or associates or pre-docs, you spend much of your time helping research happen. You review literature, design surveys, manage fieldwork, clean data, run analyses and contribute to writing.
Along the way, you develop questions of your own. Something in the data surprises you. A fieldwork experience challenges an assumption. You notice a question that sits outside your team’s current priorities.
But turning that curiosity into a research project can feel difficult. You may wonder whether independent research is something you should be doing yet. You may have a promising question but need someone with stronger methods experience, knowledge of a different context or more confidence in writing.
That is why we built Co-author at @RA Commons
Making room for your own questions
Research within an organization or lab is valuable work. It develops your skills, judgment and understanding of how studies come together. Some roles also offer meaningful authorship opportunities.
Yet the work you help produce does not always become an output bearing your name. When you move on, your skills stay with you, while much of your contribution remains within the organization’s projects.
We think young researchers should also have opportunities to develop work they can point to as their own: a question they helped shape, an analysis they can explain and a paper they helped write.
That can also help you discover which questions you care about and what kind of researcher you want to become.
You do not need to begin with every skill a research project will require. You need a worthwhile question, a willingness to contribute and people whose strengths complement yours.
From an idea to a working team
Co-author gives RA Commons members a place to start that process.
Pitch a question. Give your idea a working title, explain what you want to investigate and identify the contributions you need. You can add methods, data sources and other details as the idea develops.
Discuss it with the community. A published pitch appears in Commons, where other members can ask questions, suggest approaches and explore the idea with you. Someone can contribute to that discussion without committing to the project.
Find collaborators. Interested members can offer to contribute and explain what they would bring. Project leads review those offers and agree on who joins the team.
Work together. Accepted collaborators have a private workspace for discussion, tasks, shared document links and meeting coordination. The aim is to help a conversation become a project with a practical next step.
Start small, and agree on how you will work
Your first step might be a focused literature review, a replication or a short analysis using public data. A manageable project can give a new team room to learn how to work together.
Discuss responsibilities, realistic time commitments and authorship expectations early, then revisit them as contributions develop.
Our hope is that Co-author helps more young researchers take a question seriously—and find others willing to work on it with them.
Have a question you keep coming back to? Open Co-author in RA Commons and pitch it. Or explore an existing idea and offer a contribution.