Abstract
Teamwork is one of the most prominent features in modern science. It is now well understood that team size is an important factor that affects the creativity of the team. However, the crucial question of how the character of research studies is related to the freshness of a team remains unclear. Here, we quantify the team freshness according to the absence of prior collaboration among team members. Our results suggest that papers produced by fresher teams are associated with greater originality and a greater multidisciplinary impact. These effects are even stronger in larger teams. Furthermore, we find that freshness defined by new team members in a paper is a more effective indicator of research originality and multidisciplinarity compared with freshness defined by new collaboration relationships among team members. Finally, we show that the career freshness of team members is also positively correlated with the originality and multidisciplinarity of produced papers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1314-1322 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Nature Human Behaviour |
Volume | 5 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Funding
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (71843005 and 71731002). S.H. thanks the Israel Science Foundation and the NSF-BSF for financial support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
Funders | Funder number |
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NSF-BSF | |
National Natural Science Foundation of China | 71731002, 71843005 |
Israel Science Foundation |