An analysis of 65 million projects finds smaller teams produce more innovative research. (Credit: University of Chicago)

Examining 60 years of publications, researchers found that smaller teams were far more likely to introduce new ideas to science and technology, while larger teams more often developed and consolidated existing knowledge. While both large and small teams are essential for scientific progress, the findings suggest that recent trends in research policy and funding toward big teams should be reassessed.

The study collected 44 million articles and more than 600 million citations from the Web of Science database, 5 million patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and 16 million software projects from the Github platform. Each individual work in this massive dataset was then computationally assessed for how much it disrupted versus developed its field of science or technology.

Across papers, patents and software products, disruption dramatically declined with the addition of each additional team member. The same relationship appeared when the authors controlled for publication year, topic or author, or tested subsets of data, such as Nobel Prize-winning articles. Even review articles, which simply aggregate the findings of previous publications, are more disruptive when authored by fewer individuals, the study found.

The main driver of the difference in disruption between large and small teams appeared to be how each treat the history of their field. Larger teams were more likely to cite more recent, highly cited research in their work, building upon past successes and acknowledging problems already in their field’s zeitgeist. By contrast, smaller teams more often cited older, less popular ideas, a deeper and wider information search that creates new directions in science and technology.

The analysis shows that both small and large teams play important roles in the research ecosystem, with the former generating new, promising insights that are rapidly developed and refined by larger teams.

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