ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Flat teams drive scientific innovation.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 145 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Seven years of time-tracking data capturing collaboration and failure dynamics: the Gryzzly dataset.Scientific data · 2025Article
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- Simple autonomous agents can enhance creative semantic discovery by human groups.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The Impact of Career Plateaus on Job Performance: The Roles of Organizational Justice and Positive Psychological Capital.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.Nature · 2023Article
- Beyond kindness: a proposal for the flourishing of science and scientists alike.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Quantifying hierarchy and prestige in US ballet academies as social predictors of career success.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Multidisciplinary learning through collective performance favors decentralization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- North-south scientific collaborations on research datasets: a longitudinal analysis of the division of labor on genomic datasets (1992-2021).Frontiers in big data · 2023Article
- The credibility crisis and democratic governance: how to reform university governance to be compatible with the nature of science.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Continued collaboration shortens the transition period of scientists who move to another institution.Scientometrics · 2023Article
- Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With teams growing in all areas of scientific and scholarly research, we explore the relationship between team structure and the character of knowledge they produce. Drawing on 89,575 self-reports of team member research activity underlying scientific publications, we show how individual activities cohere into broad roles of 1) leadership through the direction and presentation of research and 2) support through data collection, analysis, and discussion. The hidden hierarchy of a scientific team is characterized by its lead (or L) ratio of members playing leadership roles to total team size. The L ratio is validated through correlation with imputed contributions to the specific paper and to science as a whole, which we use to effectively extrapolate the L ratio for 16,397,750 papers where roles are not explicit. We find that, relative to flat, egalitarian teams, tall, hierarchical teams produce less novelty and more often develop existing ideas, increase productivity for those on top and decrease it for those beneath, and increase short-term citations but decrease long-term influence. These effects hold within person-the same person on the same-sized team produces science much more likely to disruptively innovate if they work on a flat, high-L-ratio team. These results suggest the critical role flat teams play for sustainable scientific advance and the training and advancement of scientists.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.