Abstract
Abstract Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams of both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country’s scientific work is carried out by big or small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China’s research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are written by big teams, China’s drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative work does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small teams than the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States does, implying that big teams are preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which indicates a need to balance small and big teams.
Highlights
Modern science has witnessed the increasing dominance of teams
Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small teams than the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States does, implying that big teams are preferred by grant agencies in China
We extract the name of the grant agency in each paper from China and the United States, filter out those appearing fewer than 1,000 times in the data, and manually identify names associated with the NSFC and NSF
Summary
Modern science has witnessed the increasing dominance of teams. Single-author papers, though not yet as distinctly as what Price predicted in 1963 (Price, 1963), have undergone a sharp drop, taking only a small portion of all publications (Barlow, Stephens, et al, 2018; Larivière, Gingras, et al, 2015; Wuchty, Jones, & Uzzi, 2007). While it is hard to argue whether a balance or an optimum is reached in a nation, it is still meaningful to compare the small vs large team composition in different countries. This is of particular importance to China in the context of its long-term goal to be a global innovator (Phillips, 2016; Zhou, Lazonick, & Sun, 2016). As research teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative work has not increased as much as in other countries. If small teams are more apt to perform disruptive research, the science community in China should be alerted, given the different statistics that China demonstrates
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