Image: SolStock, via Getty Images
Study finds that as the average team size grows, outcomes for early career researchers decline
Large research teams damage junior team members’ careers in the long run, a new study has found.
“We argue in the paper that as the average team size grows, career outcomes for an individual get worse,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Donna Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas.
The team working on the paper combined data on career outcomes from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients with publication data from the Web of Science* that measured research team size.
Paper quality
According to the study, “whereas in some fields the order of authorship indicates the time contribution of different authors, it may not indicate which author had the key insights that determined the paper’s quality”.
Junior researchers in bigger teams are thus less likely to be promoted upward, less likely to receive funding, more likely to leave academia and less likely to obtain tenure, according to the study.
Team sizes differ for different disciplines. Ginther told Research Professional News that “economists tend to work in smaller teams than other scientists, so our team [on the paper] is considered ‘large’ by the standards of the economics profession”.
When asked about potential policy implications, Ginther said “the scientific award structure has not adapted to compensating people for teamwork” so “more information on individual contributions will help make the signal of a scientist’s contribution less noisy”.
“That said, when our results are combined with others in the literature that show that small teams innovate. This suggests that more small teams may be better for science and scientists than larger teams,” she added.
‘Small groups benefit young scientists’
William Martin, head of the Institute of Molecular Evolution at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany, agreed that “large multi-author papers dilute the contribution of each author…[and] the smaller the team, the more each member can shine on different papers”.
In his field of biology, first author position on papers is often considered important for careers, which Martin said has “led to an inflationary number of papers with multiple first authors”.
He said there may be benefits to choosing a smaller research team if given the choice, but at the same time “there are a lot of dynamics in a big group that are not captured by the statistics in that study”.
“I think outstanding young scientists will fare well in both kinds of environments,” Martin said. “[But] a small group can have beneficial effects by allowing young scientists to become visible and attain profile without having to stand in the shadow of other young talents trying to exactly the same thing”.
*Research Professional News is an editorially independent part of Clarivate, which owns Web of Science