Research is increasingly collaborative

A recent study at the Kellogg School of Management by Brian Uzzi shows that high impact research is now more likely to arise from large, distributed teams. Published in the journal Science, the study says though that the benefits of this evolution are concentrated largely among the nation’s most elite universities.

The authors examined thirty years worth of the publications tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information’s Web of Science. Multi-school collaborations were relatively rare in 1975. Over the thirty years that followed, multi-school collaborations grew steadily to account for 35 percent of publications in 2005.

The authors found that multi-school collaborations are more likely among the top universities. Lower tier schools, where research isn't cited as often, participated in only 18 percent of multi-school collaborations. Top schools where research is cited more often, participated in 60 percent of multi-school collaborations.

The authors noted that single-author papers have become increasingly rare, down from roughly 30 to 10 percent for science, 60 to 40 percent for social science.