Tag-Team Research Key for Groundbreaking Discoveries

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According to a report in this week’s issue of Science (Wuchty et al., The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge), almost all arenas of academic research have undergone a fundamental shift from the days of individual genius to team work driven discoveries.

According to the authors, this notion has been suggested for more than 40 years. However, whether teamwork leads to “better” science (i.e. higher impact work) has been in question.

Upon reviewing more than 19 million journal articles, and over 2 million patents, the researchers noted that the number of authors of published articles in engineering and the social and natural sciences has almost doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors. Similarly, the number of individuals on patents has increased from 1.7 to 2.3, a nearly 40% increase.

However, this marked increase could simply be representative of the relative cost increase in doing laboratory-based research over the past 30 years. As such, the researchers created an index for measuring the relative impact of team vs individual work. Using the average number of citations a team-article received divided by the same average of individually authored articles, it was determined that research in all areas of academia benefited from teamwork. Furthermore, the impact of teamwork in academia has sequentially increased over the past 50 years in all fields.

So what is causing this shift from individual to teamwork? The author’s do not provide any mechanism for this shift. However, through my experience in laboratory-based research, I have realized, as those around me have, that bringing minds together from various disciplines solves a problem much more quickly. Each individual has a “toolbox” of knowledge, consisting of different problem solving skills, previous experience and perhaps a research-based “intuition”.

Perhaps researchers no longer fear being “scooped”, as the general attitude towards academia shifts from one of “fame and glory”, to one that is fundamental and pure: let’s figure out what’s going on.