E-Letter responses to:

reports: Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge Science 2007; 316: 1036-1039 [Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]

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Published E-Letter responses:

Small versus Big Teamwork

Adeilton A. Brandao   (2 August 2007)

Small versus Big Teamwork 2 August 2007
Adeilton A. Brandao, Researcher Oswaldo Cruz Institute - Fiocruz Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Small versus Big Teamwork	Small versus Big Teamwork Though S. Wuchty et al.’s (Reports, 18 May, p. 1036) results strengthen the view of human knowledge being pushed to the frontier every week by the increasing number of hyper-authored papers, I see a bias in their analysis caused by their initial definition of teamwork: "A team was defined as having more than one listed author (publications) or inventor (patents)." In my view, this definition of teamwork minimizes or hides the influence that the senior/corresponding author holds in the standard arrangement of 3 to 15 authors to a scientific paper, which still resembles in shape and logic that of the solo-authored paper (i.e., Ph.D. training under supervision of a senior researcher is a leap beyond the solo-author work model). The motivation generated by teamwork in genomics or high-energy physics papers (with their hundreds of authors) is different from that of the commonly seen graduate-student collaborators/mentor-researcher format, which is predominant in the Web of Science database. A rapid survey for some keywords in this database returns mostly papers with less than 15 authors. Not adopting a minimum number of authors that could distinguish this classic teamwork model (3 to 15 authors) from the larger ones (>30 authors) may overestimate the role played by the big teams in advancing fundamental ideas, which historically have been the result of the efforts of small groups that work independently. A somewhat different picture of the role that teamwork contributes toward scientific achievements would emerge if both a minimum cutoff number for authors and segmented team groups had been generated. Wuchty et al.’s work has not answered clearly on whether the teamwork of the 3 to 15 authors of the standard scientific paper addresses more challenging issues than the larger ones of over 50 authors. Adeilton A. Brandao Researcher, Oswaldo Cruz Institute – Fiocruz, Brazil.