Larger teams worsen academic career prospects
As teams grow, new Ph.D. graduates are less likely to land tenure-track jobs and more likely to leave science—especially women and international researchers
Early-career academics are facing an increasing squeeze in the hunt for tenure-track positions and funding—and despite widespread discussion, solutions have proved evasive. Now, a new study puts a finger on a major contributor: Research teams have grown, doubling from 1.8 authors per paper on average in 1970 to 3.6 in 2004. And for each one-person increase in average team size for a given research field, newly minted Ph.D.s working in that discipline are 24% less likely to hold a tenure-track job, 29% less likely to receive tenure, 11% less likely to receive federal grants, and 11% more likely to leave science, according to a study published on 14 August in Nature Biotechnology. The people most likely to leave were women and foreign-born scientists.
“There are a lot of papers out there about the benefits of teams, but there are not many papers about the cost,” says Lingfei Wu, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information who was not involved with the study; his past work has shown smaller teams are more innovative. “Collaboration may hurt the people on the bottom of the team, because it may cloud their credit and undermine their career progression.”
The new study tests a theoretical model previously developed by two of the authors, Catherine de Fontenay of the University of Melbourne and Kwanghui Lim of the Melbourne Business School, suggesting early careers would suffer in fields with increasing team sizes. Combining data from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), which tracks U.S. Ph.D. holders’ postgraduation career paths, with the average number of authors on journal articles across seven broad fields of science, the team found that the expansion in team size between 1973 and 2013 accounted for the entire decline in tenure-track opportunities for new Ph.D.s. (The study does not look beyond 2013 because the SDR was redesigned in 2015.) Other factors that some scientists had speculated could be contributing to the trend, such as the end of mandatory retirement in academia in 1994, didn’t fully explain the effect. “Everything is created in teams, but team dynamics affect careers,” says study author Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas.
The people most likely to leave academia were women and foreign-born scientists. For them, an additional author lowered their likelihood to hold a tenure-track job by an additional 5% to 6%. “These are environments that women and foreign-born scientists are not succeeding in, and they’re disproportionately the environment that we’ve created,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and the Santa Fe Institute who has studied team size and innovation in collaboration with Wu.
The expansion of team size is not only bad for young scientists, but also bad for science’s ability to self-correct, Evans says. “Concentration of funding in massive labs increases the likelihood that we have bubbles of enthusiasm that are less likely to get checked and corrected, because those checks and corrections are correlated with the independence of the labs.”
Funding policy could be a powerful lever to pull to address these issues—but it must be applied strategically to avoid exacerbating the problem, the authors emphasize. Although one might think expanding funding for science would ease early-career competition and attrition, that’s not what Ginther’s team found. When the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) doubled its budget between 1998 and 2003, the influx of funding did not expand the number of labs but instead expanded team sizes. And the life sciences, largely funded by NIH, is where the authors saw the largest decline in percent of doctorates employed in academic tenure-track positions over the period studied.
Instead of broad funding increases, programs that specifically target midcareer researchers who are ready to start their labs could help, Ginther says. For example, she applauds an NIH mechanism begun in 2008 to give new investigators a boost getting their labs off the ground. “NIH already has an Early Stage Investigator policy to prioritize funding for early-career investigators,” Ginther says. “There was discussion of doing that for midcareer scientists as well.” Future work could evaluate the success of such programs.
Research will also be needed to investigate why early-career scientists, especially those from certain demographic groups, leave academia. The current study relies on average team sizes over entire fields, and does not explore the mechanisms behind the widespread shift in workplace dynamics they documented. “There is a lot of work to be done in the future to check individual scientists’ trajectories,” Wu says. “Where exactly did each person go?”
