Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

The increasing dominance of team science highlights the importance of understanding the effects of team composition on the creativity of research results. In this paper, we analyze the effect of team size, and field and task variety on creativity. Furthermore, we unpack two facets of creativity in science: novelty and impact. We find that increasing team size has an inverted-U shaped relation with novelty. We also find that the size–novelty relationship is largely due to the relation between size and team field or task variety, consistent with the information processing perspective. On the other hand, team size has a continually …

Science is increasingly produced in collaborative teams, but collaborative teams in science are self-assembled and fluid. Such characteristics call for a network approach to account for external activities responsible for team product but taking place beyond closed team boundaries in the open network. Given such characteristics of collaborative teams in science, we empirically test the interdependence between collaborative teams in the same network. Specifically, using fixed effects Poisson models and panel data of 1310 American scientists’ life-time publication histories, we demonstrate knowledge spillovers from new collaborators to other teams not involving these new collaborators. Our findings have important implications for …

One problem confronting the use of citation-based metrics in science studies and research evaluations is the Matthew effect. This paper reviews the role of citations in science and decomposes the Matthew effect in citations into three components: networking, prestige, and appropriateness. The networking and prestige effects challenge the validity of citation-based metrics, but the appropriateness effect does not. Using panel data of 1,279 solo-authored papers’ citation histories and fixed effects models, we test these three effects controlling for unobserved paper characteristics. We find no evidence of retroactive networking effect and only weak evidence of prestige effect (very small and not …