According to a new study from the University of Surrey which analyzed data from 1.4 million academic papers, large research teams struggle to reach top-tier journals and generate more impact. The paper has been published in Academy of Management Learning & Education.
Lead author of the study and Professor of Strategy and International Business at the University of Surrey, Professor Sorin Krammer stated that “Despite the prevalence of large teams in research, there is still a lack of a good understanding of how their size and diversity affects their performance.” The findings from this study can aid academics and industry to effectively organize teams based on their performance goals.
The study conducted by Surrey utilized data from the period between 1990 and 2020 on over 1.4 million papers and 18 million citation counts across 22 subfields in management. The authors of the study analyzed performance in two areas, impact in terms of citations gathered by a research paper and prestige in the form of a ranking of the journal where it is published.
The authors of the study discovered that the size and characteristics of teams do not uniformly affect research performance. The authors noted that academics should be cautious in thinking that larger, more technically diverse teams are better. The Surrey team also discovered a lower success rate for single-authored papers.
The combination of larger and more diverse teams is individually beneficial to research performance; however, in extreme scenarios such as very large and very diverse teams, researchers found this combination reduces the impact of research and notes fewer citations.
More information:
Sorin M. S. Krammer et al, An Ivory Tower of Babel? The Impact of Size and Diversity of Teams on Research Performance in Business Schools, Academy of Management Learning & Education (2023). DOI: 10.5465/amle.2021.0063
Citation:
Size and diversity of research teams does not automatically equate to better research outcomes, finds new study (2023, May 10)
retrieved 11 May 2023
from https://phys.org/news/2023-05-size-diversity-teams-automatically-equate.html
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