Team careers in science: formation, composition and success of persistent collaborations

Le résumé fourni par la source

Teams are the fundamental units propelling innovation and advancing modern science. A rich literature links the characteristics of teams, such as their size and diversity, to academic success. However, such analyses fail to capture temporal patterns, treating each group of co-authors as a distinct unit and neglecting the existence of persistent collaborations. By contrast, teams are dynamic entities, made of core members who consistently work together, surrounded by transient members who sporadically participate. Leveraging a large dataset of over 205 million scientific papers published since 1900, we extract 511,550 core teams of statistically significant persistent collaborations of pairs and larger groups of scientists. We look into the career of cores, investigating their trajectories in time, characterizing their formation, productivity, and eventual dissolution. We characterize core composition along multiple dimensions, including age, academic affiliation, and scientific disciplines. Finally, we investigate the academic impact of persistent collaborations, hallmarking the key compositional features underlying their success. Our work sheds light on the nature of persistent teams, informing researchers, institutions, and funding agencies about the dynamics of their formation, evolution, and success.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.