Is academic collaboration overrated? Should one seek it or avoid it? In our country, the first author gets most of the credit and the other authors practically fall much behind. While, the first author should really get more point as he does maximum work, I find the others contributions are not as minuscule as indicated by the weightage rule. To be clear it is 70 percent of the first author and rest gets 30 percent divided by the number of other authors of the paper.
In many fields collaboration is not only advisable but necessary because the expertise of a single individual is not enough to complete the work necessary. The days when one scientist can do everything themselves is long gone. People have specific areas of expertise and the work required to become a competent expert in every domain needed for a particular effort is too great.

For instance, I do modeling in a number of materials applications. There is literally no way I could do the experiments necessary to support all of the work in my research, so I need to rely on collaborators who have the necessary experience who can perform and guide the complementary experiments, as well as provide the experimental equipment!