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Larger teams are less innovative and limit the career prospects of their members, according to a large study by US academics that it says has broader implications for business, the military and other organisations.
The recent trend in scientific research has been to assemble ever larger teams that jointly publish more and more journal articles. But the consequence has been that their members receive fewer research grants, are promoted more slowly, are less likely to achieve tenure, and are more likely to resign, the study found.
The analysis, “The rise of teamwork and career prospects in academic science,” was published this week in Nature Biotechnology, a leading peer-reviewed journal. Its findings contrast with recent pressure in academia to create larger interdisciplinary teams to bring in a wider variety of perspectives.
There has been an explosion in the number of academic journals and articles, including many that have been accused of being “predatory” or lacking adequate peer review. Universities increasingly monitor authors using statistical analysis known as “bibliometrics” to determine recruitment and promotion.
Donna Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas and one of the authors of the new paper, said: “Larger teams tend to be more incremental, while smaller teams are more innovative. The size of your team at graduation will have an effect on your career. A larger team creates a noisy signal that makes it harder to tell who contributed what.”
Ginther said she was “a firm believer in the idea that there is more quality than quantity” in the production of academic papers, arguing that the growth in the number of publications has created “a vicious circle, whereby people who publish 20 papers will be scrutinized more closely than those who have two.”
He argued that the study had application in “all types of teams,” but that it is easier to track productivity in academia because there is more transparent data on the quality of work and career progress than in professions such as business or the military.
Nancy Cook, an engineering professor at Arizona State University who chaired an expert panel on the rise of “team science” and was not involved in the paper, said: “Larger teams can make teamwork more difficult, but that can be mitigated by good organization. [and] coordination. The problem is that most universities have not changed their tenure criteria and at the same time not all academics disclose their individual contributions to the team effort.”
Asked if there was a disadvantage to her fellow co-authors in having four people cited in her paper, Ginther replied that she and the other two were already established.
“Older people have an obligation to the next generation to facilitate their success, and there needs to be an apprenticeship, but it should be short,” he added: “The earlier a researcher embarks on an independent career, the better it is for the person and for science.”
