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Larger teams are less innovative and limit their members’ career prospects, according to a wide-ranging study of US academics that claims to have broader implications for business, the military and other organisations.
The recent trend in scientific research has been to assemble increasingly large teams who jointly publish ever more journal articles. But the consequence has been that their members receive fewer research grants, are promoted more slowly, are less likely to receive tenure and are more likely to quit, 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 build larger interdisciplinary teams in order to bring in a wider variety of perspectives.
There has been an explosion in the number of academic journals and articles, including many which have been accused of being “predatory” or lacking adequate peer review. Universities increasingly track authors using statistical analyses known as “bibliometrics” to determine recruitment and promotion.
Donna Ginther, a professor of economics at the University of Kansas and one of the new paper’s authors, said: “Larger teams tend to be more incremental whereas smaller ones are more innovative. Team size at the time you graduate will have an effect on your career. A larger team creates a noisy signal which makes it harder to tell who contributed what.”
Ginther said she was “a firm believer in more quality and less quantity” in the production of academic papers, while saying that the growth in the number of publications had created “a vicious cycle, so that people coming out with 20 papers will be looked at more closely than those with two.”
She argued that the study had applications in “all sorts of teams”, but it was easier to track productivity in academia because there was more transparent data available on work quality and on career progress than in professions such as business or the military.
Nancy Cook, an engineering professor at Arizona State University who chaired an expert committee on the growth in “team science” and was not involved in the paper, said: “Larger teams can make teaming more complicated, but that can be mitigated by good organisation [and] co-ordination. The problem is that most universities have not adjusted their tenure criteria and at the same time not all academics reveal their individual contributions to the teamwork.”
Asked whether there was a downside for her fellow co-authors in having four people credited on her own paper, Ginther said she and two of the others were already well established.
“Senior people have an obligation to the next generation to facilitate their success, and there is a need for an apprenticeship but it should be short,” she added: “The earlier a researcher moves into an independent career, the better for the person and for the science.”
