Small research teams are more likely to achieve results

In today's scientific and business organizations, to resolve big questions, people are more likely to build large research teams. But a recent study discovered that smaller teams are more likely to produce overturning and creative content after the analyse for more than 65 million papers, patents and software projects over the past 60 years.

According to the paper published in ‘Nature’, researchers at the University of Chicago show that smaller teams are more likely to introduce fresh ideas into science and technology, while larger teams often consolidate and develop existing knowledge.

While large and small teams are critical to scientific progress, the findings suggest that research policies and the allocation of funds to team projects should be reassessed.

“Large teams are always more conservative. Their papers were like sequels to great work; they are very unsurprising and risk-averse,” says co-author James Evans, professor of sociology and director of the UChicago Knowledge Lab, “Large teams are always looking for the past and depending on the knowledge from yesterday. Small teams try strange, unconventional things -- they go further that it may take others a long time to understand and appreciate their work.”

To finish the study, Evans and colleagues collected 44 million papers from the Web of Science database, with more than 600 million citations; they downloaded 5 million patent documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office; sixteen million software projects have been collected from Github.