Smaller research teams are more likely to develop newer, riskier ideas, but their value is at risk of being ignored by funders, according to the authors of a new study.

As contemporary science asks bigger and more complicated questions, the prevalence of smaller working groups and solitary researchers has dwindled since the mid-20th century in favour of larger, multidisciplinary teams ¨C but both small and larger teams ¡°are essential to a flourishing ecology of science¡±, a group of US researchers write.

To investigate the effects of team size on scientific output, the group analysed a dataset of more than 65 million papers, patents and software products contained in depositories including the Web of Science, over a 60-year period.

The findings,?, suggest that investigations undertaken by small groups of collaborators produce more disruptive science by ¡°developing ideas from older and less popular work¡±.

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Conversely, larger teams were found to be more risk-averse on account of their projects being less flexible,?requiring more money, resources and ultimately ¡°success¡± in matching their findings to a funded proposal.

Speaking to?Times Higher Education, James Evans, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and co-author of the report, said that the benefit of ¡°small team nimbleness¡­holds across all times, places, domains [and] topics¡±.

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The biggest surprise, according to Professor Evans, was that, despite the evidence pointing towards the value of smaller teams, those?that were well-funded tended to be similarly ¡°conservative [and] developmental¡± in their work to those of larger teams.

This suggested that ¡°when these teams are funded, they are likely funded through a conservative process that does not value what small teams offer: risk¡±.

For each dataset, researchers assessed the degree to which each work disrupted its scientific field, for instance by introducing something new. Nobel-prizewinning papers, for example, were found to be of the top 2 per cent most disruptive.

They found that solo authors were just as likely to produce highly cited papers as teams with five members. But solo-authored papers were 72 per cent more likely to be highlighted as ¡°disruptive¡±.

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As teams grew from one to 50 team members, the measured disruption of their papers dropped by 70 percentage points, the study says. Their patents also became significantly less disruptive.

¡°It was striking to us that the effect is so strong that a researcher deciding whether or not to add one more to the team will typically see a difference in disruptiveness,¡± said Professor Evans, suggesting a direct correlation between group number and disruptive effect ¡°that decreases for every additional team member. Too many collaborators will, on average, change both the search process and the disruptiveness of a work.¡±

¡°I believe that there has been an unequivocal push and support for large-scale teams in science and technology over the last half-century, which¡­has likely been driven by funders and management, but also by teams that are trying to hedge their bets,¡± Professor Evans concluded.

¡°These systems need to understand the value of risk that small teams bring¡­the real message is to managers and funders who, if they want to flee diminishing marginal returns and support breakthroughs, will need to fund science like venture capital, with a much higher tolerance for failures.¡±

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rachael.pells@timeshighereducation.com