https://theconversation.com/want-disruptive-research-go-small-instead-of-big-111737
[links and videos in online article]
Want disruptive research? Go small instead of big
February 20, 2019 7.12pm EST
Conventional wisdom suggests that large teams are better at solving
complex problems. And, in this era of specialization, many discoveries
are the work of large groups of experts from a diversity of fields. But
it’s not yet time to abandon support for small teams of scientists,
according to a new study in Nature.
By analyzing data on the work of more than 50 million teams in science
and technology, researchers discovered that larger teams developed
recent, popular ideas, while small teams disrupted the system by drawing
on older and less prevalent ideas.
Disruptive research tends to introduce new approaches and ask
fundamental questions, while “developmental” research is more likely to
adjust or test old theories and apply them in new contexts.
1,000 authors
Examples of very large projects include the Human Genome Project, and
more recently, the projects to detect gravitational waves and the Higgs
boson particle.
The detection of gravitational waves — a discovery that was published in
a paper with more than 1,000 authors and which received the 2017 Nobel
Prize in physics — “could possibly have been the most conservative
experiment in history,” says James Evans, the senior author of the new
Nature paper and a sociologist at the University of Chicago. “It tested
a 100-year old hypothesis and that hypothesis was generated by one
person, Albert Einstein.”
Solo scientists like Einstein, or small teams, appear to come up with
novel ideas that change the course of a field. Those are becoming rarer,
though: authorship lists on scientific papers have grown in the last
century, from about one author per paper in 1913 to an average of 5.4
authors per paper in 2013.
The impact of this shift in team sizes isn’t completely known. This new
study documents the different roles that small and large scientific
teams play in the research landscape, but it raises more questions than
it answers.
Different sizes, different approaches
These are questions that would help funding agencies to make better
decisions.
“There’s this long, long debate about this,” says John Walsh, who
studies science, technology and innovation using a sociological
perspective. “Is giving a lot of money to one (large) project a good way
of moving the science forward, or is it better to give lots of people
more modest funds and have them work on different things?”
In small teams, people are more apt to take chances because the cost of
taking a chance is lower. There are fewer monetary resources invested
and fewer careers at stake, Walsh explains.
What’s interesting, adds Walsh, is that the effects described by Evans
and his co-authors Lingfei Wu and Dashun Wang show up even at modest
team sizes — between one and 10 people.
One way of interpreting the finding is that small teams have a better
chance of finding something unusual because they can be nimble and adapt
to new findings by changing direction and pursuing new paths as they
open up. It’s unclear, though, whether small teams propose more
innovative and disruptive ideas to begin with, or whether they are more
likely to change course midstream and “benefit from serendipity,” he says.
In contrast, large teams are more like huge shipping barges — impossible
to turn on a dime. They are also faced with all sorts of conservative
pressures.
“We realized just from our own experience that creating these big
federations of people ends up really stifling certain kinds of ideas and
certainly stifling the likelihood of following an interesting or unusual
path,” says Evans. You have to get to the common denominator to build
consensus, and “the common denominator, when you have a lot of people,
is yesterday’s hits.”
Indeed, Evans’s study shows that large teams are more likely to cite the
really famous older papers, whereas smaller groups are likely to cite a
broader array of papers and to resurrect some more obscure findings from
prior literature.
Because of the burden of co-ordination in large teams, “it’s much more
likely that a small group of committed people can hammer on a problem
and come up with a breakthrough or disruptive solution than a really
large group, where they’re not going to be able to to really
coordinate,” says Steve Kozlowski, a professor of organizational psychology.
The co-ordination challenges increase when the large group is
interdisciplinary because scientists have different sets of assumptions
about the way the world works based on their disciplinary training.
Size matters?
Mirta Galesic, professor of Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe
Institute, thinks that the small and large teams may represent different
stages of the natural history of an idea.
Initially, a disruptive or unconventional idea is born small and only
has a few people working on it. But if it stands up to initial
investigation and scrutiny, it may attract more funding and more
scientists to work on it. In other words, the disruptive work of small
teams represents the seeds from which big projects grow.
“I think it’s possible that the small and large teams occur at different
stages of the scientific process and that it could be a case that the
size is correlated with the process, rather than the cause of a
disruption,” says Galesic.
Implications for funding agencies
“What’s the secret sauce that the small teams seem to have?” Kozlowski
asks. He’d like to see funding agencies invest more resources in
studying team science: “If we’re going to be pushing for these large
investments to tackle big problems, then we want to have research to
help inform how these larger teams should be set up and managed.”
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