A Journey to the ‘First’ Publication
Written by Md Abid Hasan and Dr Haseeb Md Irfanullah.
Not having met each other in person, Md Abid Hasan and Dr Haseeb Md Irfanullah (an AuthorAID Mentor and Steward), both from Bangladesh, recently collaborated successfully in designing, conducting and publishing research. In this blog post, they share their individual reflections on their collaboration, which began during the pandemic lockdown back in June 2021.
How the mentee sees the journey
Md Abid Hasan
In the development sector, ‘research’ is more of a tool to understand stakeholders and beneficiaries, to analyse existing challenges and to review the outcomes of any project intervention. It is mostly true that rigorous and methodological research is usually practiced by academics and professional researchers, rather than by development professionals.
In a country like Bangladesh, which allocates the bare minimum of its GDP to academic research at its universities, being a non-academic young researcher is not that easy. Nevertheless, during the country-wide lockdown period last year, I aspired to go for research and publication driven by a personal passion. I didn’t start from a completely blank state, as I knew what my research interests were.
The challenge was receiving proper guidance. I didn’t know where or how to start the process. In that puzzling situation, I took a risk, and it wasn’t quite a calculated one. I was following a few of the industry’s experts on LinkedIn for a couple of months; and I approached one of them!
A random message from an unknown guy is nothing but suspicious. However, Dr. Haseeb Md. Irfanullah, one of the experienced development professionals and researchers in contemporary Bangladesh, responded to my message of 7 June 2021 with a blind trust. What I have loved most was not his response to my message, but rather that he assessed me critically. During our introductory virtual meeting, he carefully asked about my research intentions, purpose and motivation.
It is true that I was intimidated at first, but very soon I felt his genuine interest in working with an unknown and inexperienced research enthusiast. Quickly, we jumped into the topic selection and concluded that we were going to do a policy and practice review of rain-water harvesting systems in urban Bangladesh under changing climate conditions.
During our ten-month-long collaboration, we strictly followed a few self-imposed rules. First, we set deadlines for each of the single tasks and tried our best to respect those deadlines. Second, we were frank with each other. I also admitted my weaknesses, and he always ensured to be listening to my thoughts and concerns. Most importantly, we tried to adapt to our dissimilarities, different styles and diverse opinions.
And we made history in March 2022! Dr. Irfanullah completed his first successful non-organisational research collaboration, and I got my first article published in an Open Access journal (Water Policy), indexed by both the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus. Two independent researchers, who never met in person during the whole study period, made their collaboration a success only because of mutual trust and respect.
Our personal experience of success can be useful for many others, if we can process this in a systematic manner. A common platform for Bangladeshi research enthusiasts can result in many success stories like this, and our young research enthusiasts and novice researchers can be involved in research activities, contributing to a greener and more sustainable Bangladesh.
How the mentor sees the journey
Haseeb Md Irfanullah
Despite not having chosen research as my full-time profession, I have always been a research enthusiast. That encouraged me to be a mentor of AuthorAID and several other mentoring programmes. I left my regular job in the development sector back in November 2018 to start an independent consultancy career. My research mentorship gained new momentum when I joined the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) in June 2019 as a visiting research fellow. Along with teaching undergraduate students research design, I started guiding young researchers at the ULAB Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) to design, conduct and publish research. Around the same time, my collaboration with the University of Oxford also flourished, which was translated into a couple of systematic reviews on nature-based solutions (NbS).
Capitalising on my house-bound life during the COVID-19 pandemic, I managed to publish one opinion piece and co-author three original articles (here, here and here) with CSD-ULAB colleagues, as well as a systematic review article with colleagues at Oxford – all in 2021! It’s worth mentioning that I published my last journal article back in 2013.
Yet, the article Md Abid Hasan and I published on 30 March 2022 in Water Policy (which follows the Subscribe to Open model) will always be very special to me.
Over the last 13 years, I never remained silent when a young researcher approached me for help or to collaborate – be it via AuthorAID or by other means. However, I am sorry to say, almost every single one didn’t continue the conversation after the first email exchange or the first virtual meeting. Abid and my collaboration is unique in my mentorship career, because for the first time I managed to complete a research mentoring collaboration, without any organisational connection, with a tangible output. We designed and conducted a piece of research and published the results in a peer-reviewed open access journal – the goal we set out in our first couple of virtual meetings.
Mentoring is indeed a project built on mutual respect. Although I started conversing with Abid the way I always do with potential mentees, his clear vision, and later on his strong determination – displayed by him through meeting the deadlines with promised outputs – made me believe in him, respect him.
Abid quite rightly mentioned above why our collaboration worked, so I don’t want to repeat his arguments. What I have learnt from this successful collaboration is – two strangers must trust and respect each other; they must be honest about their intentions; and they must agree upon a common goal and on how to reach it. Sounds cliché? Maybe it is. But I would never have truly understood that if my collaboration with Md Abid Hasan hadn’t worked out.