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Published Online October 9, 2008
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1158357

Reports

Submitted on March 27, 2008
Accepted on September 25, 2008

Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science

Benjamin F. Jones 1{dagger}, Stefan Wuchty 2{dagger}, Brian Uzzi 3{dagger}*

1 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston IL 60208, USA.; National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
2 Northwestern Institute on Complexity (NICO), Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.; Present address: National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20982 USA.
3 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston IL 60208, USA.; Northwestern Institute on Complexity (NICO), Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.; Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Brian Uzzi , E-mail: uzzi{at}northwestern.edu

{dagger}These authors contributed equally to this work.

This paper demonstrates that teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries, a dramatic shift in knowledge production that generalizes across virtually all fields of science, engineering, and social science. Moreover, elite universities play a dominant role in this shift. Using 4.2 million papers published over three decades, we find that multi-university collaborations (i) are the fastest growing type of authorship structure; (ii) produce the highest impact papers when they include a top-tier university, and (iii) are increasingly stratified by in-group university rank. Despite the rising frequency of research that crosses university boundaries, the intensification of social stratification in multi-university collaborations suggests a concentration of the production of scientific knowledge in fewer rather than more centers of high-impact science.


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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)