Bigger Is Not Always Better for Team Science
Small research groups tend to beat large collaborations when it comes to producing innovative projects and breakthrough discoveries.
Keywords: careerscitation analysiscitationscollaborationcollective behaviorimpact factorinterdisciplinary researchmanagementNewsscience fundingscience policy
To make breakthroughs that shatter the scientific status quo, researchers may be better off working in small teams, a paper in Nature today (February 13) concludes. The report, which examines the citations of tens of millions of research papers and patents, indicates that big teams tend to work on existing theories rather than instigating new ones.
“The core finding that smaller scientific teams tend to produce more disruptive scientific findings is really interesting in the context of the secular trend toward bigger and bigger teams,” says sociologist Jason Owen-Smith of the University of Michigan who was not involved in the project. The work suggests “we need to think about supporting . . . diversity of the research enterprise.”
