A study examining 1.4 million academic papers exposes that bigger research teams do not necessarily produce higher-quality research. The research likewise discovered that in severe cases, varied and overly big groups may actually decrease research study impact.
After evaluating data from 1.4 million scholastic documents, a new study from the University of Surrey found no connection between the size of a research group and the quality of the research produced.
Professor Sorin Krammer, lead author of the study and Professor of Strategy and International Business at the University of Surrey, said:
” Despite the frequency of big teams in research study, there is still an absence of a mutual understanding of how their size and diversity impacts their performance.”
” Our findings will assist academics, and maybe market, to arrange teams more successfully according to their performance objectives.”
The Surrey study used data in between the years 1990 and 2020 on more than 1.4 million documents and 18 million citation counts across 22 subfields in management.
Researchers caught performance in 2 distinct areas: impact, in the type of citations collected by a research paper, and prestige, in the kind of ranking of the journal where it is published. They looked at diversity in terms of knowledge proficiency, and worldwide representation.
The study discovered that neither the size, nor the qualities of teams uniformly impacted research efficiency, and highlighted that academics must be careful in believing that larger, more technically varied groups are better.
Professor Krammer continued: “We also discovered a lower success rate for single-authored papers. Often, it takes single authors a big quantity of time, resources, proficiency, and effort to establish such research study papers that naturally have much lower success rates and impact, therefore, the requirement by lots of schools to have such single-authored top publications as a requirement for profession, period or promo advancement seems unnecessary and unreasonable.”
While both larger and more varied groups are independently useful to research performance, in severe scenarios (i.e., very varied and very big groups), scientists discovered that this mix lowers the impact of research, keeping in mind less citations.
Referral: “An Ivory Tower of Babel? The Impact of Size and Diversity of Teams on Research Performance in Business Schools” by Sorin M. S. Krammer and Peter Dahlin, 11 April 2023, Academy of Management– Learning and Education.DOI: 10.5465/ amle.2021.0063.