The Strength in Numbers

The New Science of Team Science

Barry Bozeman, Jan Youtie

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888610
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Investigación y metodología científicas

Once upon a time, it was the lone scientist who achieved brilliant breakthroughs. No longer. Today, science is done in teams of as many as hundreds of researchers who may be scattered across continents and represent a range of hierarchies. These collaborations can be powerful, but they demand new ways of thinking about scientific research. When three hundred people make a discovery, who gets credit? How can all collaborators' concerns be adequately addressed? Why do certain STEM collaborations succeed while others fail?Focusing on the nascent science of team science, The Strength in Numbers synthesizes the results of the most far-reaching study to date on collaboration among university scientists to provide answers to such questions. Drawing on a national survey with responses from researchers at more than one hundred universities, anonymous web posts, archival data, and extensive interviews with active scientists and engineers in over a dozen STEM disciplines, Barry Bozeman and Jan Youtie set out a framework to characterize different types of collaboration and their likely outcomes. They also develop a model to define research effectiveness, which assesses factors internal and external to collaborations. They advance what they have found to be the gold standard of science collaborations: consultative collaboration management. This strategy—which codifies methods of consulting all team members on a study's key points and incorporates their preferences and values—empowers managers of STEM collaborations to optimize the likelihood of their effectiveness. The Strength in Numbers is a milestone in the science of team science and an indispensable guide for scientists interested in maximizing collaborative success.

1

Research Collaboration and Team Science

WITNESSING THE REVOLUTION

Introduction

The scientific myth of the brilliant solitary scientist has long held sway, the image of the scientist emerging reluctantly from his (yes, it is a masculine myth) laboratory to communicate breakthrough results that will push knowledge ahead in great leaps and bounds. However, in recent decades the myth, one that previously held at least a kernel of truth (Lightman 2008), has become more and more difficult to sustain. While there may somewhere be some future Einstein laboring anonymously while developing potentially earthshaking thought experiments, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that almost all contemporary science is team science. In today’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (hereafter STEM) research, more than 90 percent of publications are coauthored (Bozeman and Boardman 2014). Convincing evidence (Wuchty et al. 2007) shows that coauthored research, as compared to single-researcher work, more often leads to high knowledge impacts as well as to commercial uses of research as reflected in patents. Further, the success of collaborative teams attracts more collaborators, thus accelerating the growth of research teams (Parker and Hackett 2012).

Based on years of research on research collaboration and team science, our book aims to increase the probabilities that research teams will succeed in their collaborative efforts. We are certainly not the first students of research collaboration. For decades, others have studied research collaboration, and much can be learned from these earlier studies (for reviews, see Katz and Martin 1997; Beaver 2001; Bozeman and Boardman 2014). So why this book and why now? The succinct answer is that research collaboration and team science are no longer evolving slowly; in the past few years, researchers have seen and actively participated in a research collaboration and team science revolution. The revolution has many aspects, including the growth in the sheer number of collaborators, but also entails a greater mix in the number and disciplinary diversity of collaborators. We are witnessing a new “collaboration cosmopolitanism” (Bozeman and Corley 2004; Ynalvez and Shrum 2011), as researchers from industry collaborate with those in universities, as researchers from one discipline collaborate with those from other disciplines, and as globalization trends and communications technology facilitate increased cross-national collaborations.

While the research collaboration revolution has, in our view, advanced the technological and human resources brought to bear on research projects and problems, it has also created formidable challenges. The revolution presents challenges with crediting and scientific reputation. Historically, processes for assigning credit for research work were reasonably straightforward: a researcher was or was not the author of a scientific paper and was or was not included on a patent. But the traditional norms for recognition break down when the number of authors proliferates. When there are more than a hundred authors listed for a five-page journal article, what does this signify? Related, new ethical problems have begun to emerge. With one or two or a handful of authors, credit attribution presents fewer challenges, but with expanding research teams the likelihood increases that any particular individual contributed literally nothing. The size and diversity of research teams increases the likelihood of conflict. All things being equal, the more persons involved in a team, the more likely that some team members will not play well with others. Research collaboration is no longer about working with friends at the end of the hall or at the other bench in the lab. With the globalization of teams and increased disciplinary, cultural, and gender diversity, we can see that the challenges for research teams differ greatly from the challenges researchers faced pre-revolution.

While almost all researchers are participating in the revolution, some are barely aware of it (most younger researchers take the current research collaboration regime for granted) and others are so busy with their day-to-day work that they have little time, energy, or inclination to spend much time reflecting on the revolution’s implications, much less to develop strategies for steering it in the directions they wish. We feel we can help. Our research is on the social and managerial aspects of research teams and the factors affecting research collaboration.

We provide “front lines” reporting on the research collaboration revolution, as well as evidence-based suggestions about how to improve the effectiveness of modern research collaboration. We employ multiple data sources and multiple research methods, including evidence from survey data, data from Web posts, and archival data, but the core evidence presented in our book is from extensive interviews with active, collaborating academic researchers (those interested in detailed information about our data and methods should consult appendix 1). Our book documents and comments on the research collaboration revolution, even as it transpires, and we suggest how research teams confronting a new and radically changed collaboration environment can work more effectively. A necessary first step in coping with revolution is self-conscious awareness—understanding that it is happening, understanding why it is happening, and understanding its components.

Components of the Research Collaboration Revolution

Twentieth-century research collaboration has much in common with twenty-first-century collaboration, many of same advantages, disadvantages, and problems. But there are several elements of contemporary research collaboration that are quite distinct and important enough to characterize a revolution. Revolutionary changes in research collaboration and team science include changes in (1) the sheer number of collaborations and team members per collaboration; (2) commercialization of academic research; (3) gender diversity; (4) multiculturalism and the global conduct of research; (5) increased multidisciplinary (and interdisciplinary) collaboration; (6) contributorship and ethical issues; (7) a self-consciousness about “team science,” including new policies and approaches to understanding and managing research collaboration.

THE STRENGTH IN NUMBERS REVOLUTION

Research collaboration¹ is so ubiquitous that it is not possible to understand the dynamics of contemporary STEM research absent some knowledge of collaborative research in teams. Collaboration is nowadays a concomitant of research. However, the idea of “strength in numbers” relates not only to the increased incidence of collaboration but also to the fact that the number of collaborators and coauthors has expanded greatly in many STEM fields. Recently, a paper (Aad et al. 2015) published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters included 5,154 authors, such a large number of authors that twenty-four pages of a thirty-three-page article were taken up with the listing of authors. We are confident that four-figure author lists will not become the norm. More important is the fact that the number of coauthors per article has increased in every STEM field (Regalado 1995; Abramo and D’Angelo 2015). Even mathematics, the last refuge of the solitary thinker, has witnessed an uptake in coauthoring (Huang 2015).

At first blush, one might well conclude that the increase in the number and incidence of collaborators is an unalloyed blessing. The fact that most studies show that increased collaboration has positive effect on research productivity seems to reinforce this view (e.g., Li et al. 2013; Ductor 2015). However, there are opposing or more nuanced views. For example, Lee and Bozeman (2005) find that different approaches to citation counts lead to different conclusions about the productivity effects of collaboration and coauthoring. With a “normal count” of citations, assigning one citation to each author, the effects of collaboration on citation are quite positive. But with a “fractional count,” dividing credit for citations by number of authors, the number of citations accumulated is not greater than for sole authored papers.

From another perspective, it simply makes intuitive sense that research collaboration, despite possible advantages, is at best net positive, not entirely positive in its cost benefit. Research collaborations offer benefits impossible or difficult to obtain, but they also entail costs. The transactions costs (Landry and Amara 1998) in setting up, coordinating, and managing collaborations vary considerably according to a variety of factors, including the number of collaborators, their familiarity with one another, geographic distance, communications media employed, differences in norms, and goals and incentives, among other factors.

In considering the effects of research collaboration on productivity, one may wish to take into account not only counts of discrete knowledge products (e.g., publications, citations, patents) but also more general impacts on research institutions and researchers’ careers (Leahey et al. 2015). One of the most obvious problems arising from the increased number of coauthors is the difficulty posed in the evaluation of contributions. When there are, say, eight coauthors, do they all get the same amount of credit? We could say that the first author should receive more credit, but in some fields the authorship is alphabetical, in others it is the corresponding author who is the leading contributor, and in still others it is the last author who has contributed most. The issues surrounding credit and reputation are not merely a matter of scientific ego. In the first place, tenure, promotion, and hiring decisions are all based in part on the reputation and the credit one receives from publishing refereed journal articles. With large number of coauthors, review committees puzzle over contributions. The task is much more difficult when the multiple author problem is exacerbated by multidisciplinary research teams with diverse crediting norms and practices (Lozano 2013; Egghe et al. 2013).

While the complexities of crediting represent an important problem, much more problematic is the phenomenon of “honorary authorship” (Kovacs 2013), instances where people are included as coauthors but who made no contribution to the research beyond possibly serving as a lab director or providing part of the funds for the study or by just being in need of credit to advance one’s career. This is not an isolated issue (Greenland and Fontanarosa 2012); one study (Wislar et al. 2011) of honorary authors and “ghost authors” (ones who made a contribution but were not acknowledged as coauthors) showed that a little more than one-fifth of published biomedical journal articles had distortions in the relationship of actual work to authorship crediting, with most of the distortions owing to honorary authors.

The problem of honorary authors has multiple consequences, some beyond the career impacts of the individual. For example, research grants and contract awards are based in large measure on scientific reputation. One might well feel cheated when losing out in the award sweepstakes to a person who has multiple items on the curriculum vita that do not reflect actual work or expertise on a topic. Even more important, persons with large, publications-based reputations are called upon to testify before policy-making bodies and to serve as consultants for industry. When those reputations are inflated by publications in which they had no part, then the expertise claim might be hollow and the advice provided by spurious experts may be inferior (Moffatt 2011; Greenland and Fontanarosa 2012). When the “expertise” is more apparent than real, the consequences are potentially dire (Kempers 2002; Annesley 2011), especially when the topic of concern has to do with public health and safety, such as, for example, the efficacy of new medical treatments or pharmaceuticals.

As we see in later chapters, research managers and professional groups have made some headway with the problem of assessing the individual’s contributions to collaborations that include large numbers of authors and even with the thorny problems of honorary and ghost authors. The basic point, however, is that increased numbers of collaborators and coauthors can present problems. There is no likelihood that the strength-in-numbers approach will diminish. Collaboration is a central feature of contemporary research, a revolution in the way research proceeds, and a phenomenon deserving the scrutiny it is receiving from scholars, research team members, and policy makers.

THE ACADEMIC CAPITALISM REVOLUTION

Academic research, our chief focus in this book, continues to reel from another revolution that has deeply affected the very focus of scientific and technical work, the commercialization of research. For decades, US science technology policy insisted that all federally funded research be public domain and, especially, that patenting and drawing individual commercial benefit from such research, that is to say most of the research work in academic science, was forbidden. From the late 1980s forward, the policies related to the disposition of intellectual property from federally sponsored research and development (R&D) changed dramatically, in part due to a perceived crisis in national economic competitiveness (Sampat 2006). The Stevenson-Wydler Act of 1980 made technology transfer a mission of federal laboratories and permitted the labs and even lab scientists in some cases to profit commercially from R&D work performed at the lab. In the same year, the Bayh-Dole Act allowed recipients of federal R&D funds, including private contractors, nonprofits, businesses, and—most relevant for our purposes—universities, to file for patents and inventions from their federally sponsored research. While Bayh-Dole was not at its inception viewed as landmark legislation, history shows that it fundamentally altered research universities and their science and technology activities (Grimaldi et al. 2011), having impacts directly on universities’ commercialization and intellectual property, as well as wide-range effects on the structure of research institutions, on faculty career motives and performance assessment, on graduate education, and on university-industry relations. Some critics of so-called academic capitalism abhorred these changes as the selling out of universities for commercial goals (e.g., Slaughter and Rhoades 2004), whereas others, especially researchers assessing effects of the “entrepreneurial university,” applauded these new activities as more in touch with economic needs, more likely to produce economically relevant education, and as an important ingredient in regional economic growth (for an overview, see Rothaermel et al. 2007).

Later in this book we review the evidence for the impacts of commercially focused university R&D, but at this point suffice it to say that this set of changes qualifies truly as revolutionary and that its impacts on the nature of research collaboration are in some instances seismic in nature. The most obvious change is a vast increase in university-industry research collaborations and, relatedly, the composition of research teams. But commercialization has also in many cases changed or expanded the motivations for collaborating. On the plus side, collaborations often are more fulfilling as a result of new missions and a new mix of actors. On the minus side, legal issues and differences in institutional cultures often pose problems, sometimes thorny and complex difficulties not present in the pre–Bayh-Dole university environment.

THE GENDER DIVERSITY REVOLUTION

The “great man” theory of scientific advance (Boring 1950) no longer has much veracity, though perhaps the “great person” theory works a little better. In 1973, the year the NSF (2014) began collecting and reporting systematic data on the gender mix of academic STEM faculty in the United States, the 118,000 scientists, engineers, and social scientists included 10,700 women, with the largest proportion of women being in the social sciences. By 2010, the year of the most recently available data, the US STEM workforce had grown to 294,800, including 105,200 women—less than 10 percent in 1973, more than 30 percent in 2010. In some fields of biomedical research, parity approaches.

With the diversity revolution, great changes are afoot in the composition and dynamics of collaborative research teams (Leahey 2006; Tartari and Salter 2015; Gaughan and Bozeman 2016). Empirical studies (Fenwick and Neal 2001; Joshi 2014) suggest that gender-balanced teams are more effective in some important respects, but our previous research (e.g., Gaughan and Bozeman 2016) as well as the new results reported here show that gender-based conflict sometimes occurs in gender-mixed research teams and, even more often, gender-related misunderstandings or uncertainty about the impacts of gender on team interactions. A gender-diverse research team often requires a different skill set managerial approaches than single-gender teams.

THE MULTICULTURAL REVOLUTION

Academic science is no longer the preserve of middle-class white Americans. In fact, immigrants have long played an important role in US research and research teams, with post–World War II providing a prime illustration, as Germans and Eastern Europeans, many of them Jews fleeing the Nazi ...