system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Collaboration problems

I have been collaborating with a colleague from another department for a little over a year, and now that we are in the writing/publishing stage of the study, there are some issues popping up that I could really use advice on...

The biggest problem is that I am learning that my collaborator is somewhat intellectually lazy.  This person is very enthusiastic (to say the least) about churning out as many papers as possible, without giving a lot of thought to the intellectual/academic merit of these papers.  This often results in them producing work that (both I and reviewers believe) is sloppy, poorly researched, and often poorly written.  I am left doing some much editing on each piece, that I might as well just write these papers on my own.   

The second (related) issue came up today, when this person sent me a paper they had been working on (on which they are first author and I am second).  As I was reading the literature review this person "wrote", I realized that it was basically lifted word-for-word from multiple documents *I* wrote in the past...Basically my collaborator/co-author did not do any additional research or writing on his/her own.  This person copied and pasted my paragraphs (from multiple sources) and sort of patched them together.  In principle, I have no problem with this, because we are both authors on the paper and the ideas are similar.  However, I also feel thrown off, because they sent me the paper saying they had been working on the literature review for weeks. It also raises some questions in my mind about order of authorship for this particular manuscript.   

I can't help but feel like I'm sort of being taken advantage of in a weird way.  I don't know how to approach this person about their lack of academic rigor without ruining this relationship.  Not only do we have several ongoing project together, but we also share grant money to collect more data.  Also, there are some benefits to this collaboration, as this person has a lot of contacts in the field and has made much of our data collection efforts possible.

ANY advice would be greatly appreciated..
gpt
best advice, imo, is to take this as an opportunity to improve your soft skills and learn from experience. 

I've been in a similar situation, and it is never easy to deal with it. The best outcome here is compromise, that almost by definition, probably none of you will particularly enjoy. You'll try to nudge him into doing more serious work, he'll probably resist some and you'll eventually have to pick up the slack, and decide if the end result is acceptable by your own standards. 

I definitely do not recommend sharing your opinion about the quality of his previous work, unless you are not at all interested in collaborating with him ever.

If anything, learn your lesson, and run a background check before you decide to collaborate with anyone.