The Role of Trust in Collaborative Research Settings: Opportunities for Future Research in Graduate Engineering Education

Collaborative research is becoming the norm for science and engineering graduate students as the future of engineering research is increasingly interdisciplinary. However, little research describes the competencies required for graduate student success on collaborative and interdisciplinary teams. In related work, researchers in “science of team science” (usually focused on collaborative medical research settings) have begun to study the factors for success of collaborative and often interdisciplinary teams. One of the least-studied and abstract of these factors is the construct of trust—both within team members and in relation to the team leaders. This paper uses a systematic literature review method to investigate the role of trust within collaborative research settings, with the intention of unveiling future research directions for graduate-level engineering education. The results of this systematic literature review demonstrate that there is not a singular, clear, standard definition of trust within collaborative research and that there is a lack of studies that explore trust and collaboration within research settings and particularly none are aimed at the ways in which people develop these skills. The results of this review are immediately relevant to researchers involved with interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and have implications for those that educate graduate students to be future collaborative and interdisciplinary researchers.