Related papers: Small Teams Propel Fresh Ideas in Science and Tech…
Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent,…
Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But while there are…
As science transitions from the age of lone geniuses to an era of collaborative teams, the question of whether large teams can sustain the creativity of individuals and continue driving innovation has become increasingly important. Our…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
The era of Big Science has long been defined by increasingly large and specialized research teams pushing the frontiers of knowledge. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), are…
Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they produce. Here, we…
Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams with both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country's scientific work is…
Incorporating fresh members in teams is considered a pathway to team creativity. However, whether freshness improves team performance or not remains unclear, as well as the optimal involvement of fresh members for team performance. This…
Teamwork is one of the most prominent features in modern science. It is now well-understood that the team size is an important factor that affects team creativity. However, the crucial question of how the character of research studies is…
Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science. A rich literature links the fundamental features of teams, such as their size and diversity, to academic success. However, such analyses fail to capture…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
We study the Japan and U.S. patent records of several decades to demonstrate the effect of collaboration on innovation. We find that statistically inventor teams slightly outperform solo inventors while company teams perform equally well as…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
Research teams are the fundamental social unit of science, and yet there is currently no model that describes their basic property: size. In most fields teams have grown significantly in recent decades. We show that this is partly due to…
Teams now drive most scientific advances, yet the impact of absolute beginners -- authors with no prior publications -- remains understudied. Analyzing over 29 million articles published between 1941 and 2020 across disciplines and team…
With teams growing in all areas of scientific and scholarly research, we explore the relationship between team structure and the character of knowledge they produce. Drawing on 89,575 self-reports of team member research activity underlying…
This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. firm. AI-assisted researchers discover…
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: diversity breeds innovation, and yet, underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this…