The Secret of Building a Scientific Community

Scientific communities are the base on which most scientific projects are built, particularly in the life sciences. Scientific networks (Fig. 1) are required because all projects are complex and the skills required for their successful accomplishment are more than that of what a single individual can contribute.

Fig. 1: A sketch of a small network displaying community structure, with three groups of people with dense internal connections and sparser connections between groups. [Taken from Wikipedia; author j_ham3 (CC BY-SA 3.0)] I believe the success of current and future scientific careers is going to be conditioned more and more by the ability of managing relations in these communities, be able to influence them and understand their dynamics. In fact, since I started doing proper research 14 years ago, I do not remember a single research project I have been involved in which I was not part of a scientific network…