On the disruptive power of small-teams research
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On the disruptive power of small‑teams research António Osório1 · Lutz Bornmann2 Received: 21 September 2019 / Accepted: 9 October 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract Recent studies have shown that research by small teams is more likely to lead to disruptive results than research by large teams. Disruptive research challenges established paradigms. This paper offers a possible theory to explain this paradox. We argue that individuals in possession of research ideas with great disruptive potential have incentives to form small teams and compensate potential group weaknesses with a greater research effort rather than considering additional co-authors. Additional co-authors have the advantage of bringing more overall effort and expertise to the team, reducing technical difficulties, and increasing the chances of success and the potential value of the ideas. We show that individuals in possession of potentially disruptive research ideas prefer to keep teams as small as possible, because the resulting credits per co-author decrease as the value of the project is split among more co-authors. Keywords Bibliometrics · Scientific impact · Disruption · Research teams’ size JEL Classification C72 · O31
Introduction Research has become increasingly complex and interdisciplinary, with research collaborations having an increasingly larger number of co-authors (Gazni et al. 2012; Larivière et al. 2015; Persson et al. 2004; Wuchty et al. 2007). The size of research groups and the scientific impact in terms of citations have been shown to be highly correlated (Hsu and Huang 2011; Onodera and Yoshikane 2015; among others). However, authors are critical of the use of citations as an accurate measure of scientific impact due to its strategic use (Catalini et al. 2015), non-scientific aspects that play a role in the decision to cite (Bornmann and Daniel 2008), and the difficulty in capturing the difference between publications, collaborations, and citation practices across fields (Waltman 2016; Waltman and van Eck 2019). * António Osório [email protected] Lutz Bornmann [email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Eco‑SOS, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Reus, Spain
2
Max Planck Society MPG, Munich, Germany
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
In a recent study, Wu et al. (2019) apply the network approach in Funk and OwenSmith (2017), in order to challenge the use of citations as an accurate measure of scientific impact, and to offer a new perspective on this issue. They consider 24,174,022 research articles published from 1954–2014 and indexed in the Web of Science, and show that the median citations to articles increase with team size, but that the disruptiveness decreases with team size (In The Disruption Index and the Number of Co-authors section, we discuss in greater detail the negative relation between the number of co-authors and disruptiveness).1 The results are also found to be robust for patents and software projects on GitHub, and across different scientific disciplines and
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