Teams are Supplanting Individual Researchers in Science and Mathematics

April 13, 2007

Teams of researchers — rather than individuals — are becoming the norm in research in diverse areas of scientific endeavor, ranging from lab-bench science to engineering to mathematics. This trend is also starting to appear in the arts and humanities, according to a new study published in Science. Apparently, it's even becoming a trend in mathematics, where more and more practitioners are finding themselves involved in team-based research and writing.

Three researchers from the Northwestern University looked at authors of scientific papers in the years 1955-2000, as well as those who had obtained patents from 1975 to 1999. They discovered that the number of research teams generating papers and patents had grown over the years while the number of single-author papers and patents had declined.

"Research is increasingly done in teams across virtually all fields," Stefan Wuchty and his colleagues concluded. "Teams now also produce more highly cited research than individuals do, and this advantage is increasing over time." According to the authors, these results suggest that "the process of knowledge creation has fundamentally changed."

Source: S. Wuchty, B.F. Jones, and B. Uzzi. 2007. The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science. See http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.dtl.