Contents
On May 14, 2015, the journal Physical Review Letters publishes a 33-page article. Only nine of those pages are the paper itself. The remaining 24 pages are the list of authors: 5,154 names. It is the first joint paper by CERN’s two experiments, ATLAS and CMS, on the mass of the Higgs particle. The image of the lone researcher explaining the world from a lab no longer fits this work. An example of the Team Principle of Necessity.
19.9 Million Papers
Situation
In 2007, Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones and Brian Uzzi publish an analysis of 19.9 million research papers spanning five decades and 2.1 million US patents in the journal Science. The result: in science and engineering, the mean number of authors per paper rises from 1.9 to 3.5 between 1955 and 2000. In the social sciences, the share of team-authored papers grows from 17.5% to 51.5%. For patents, the number of inventors per patent rises from 1.7 to 2.3. Teamwork increases in 99.4% of 171 subfields of science and engineering. Even the humanities, where more than 90% of papers are written by individuals, show the same trend.
Connection to the team principle
The Team Principle of Necessity says: a team pays off only when the task is bigger than any one person. The figures suggest that this is exactly what has happened in science over fifty years, in almost every discipline. The questions have grown bigger than the people asking them.
Teams Are Cited More Often
Situation
The three researchers also look at impact. Team papers are cited more often than single-author papers, and the gap is widening: in science and engineering, their citation advantage rises from a factor of 1.7 in 1955 to 2.1 in 2000. There, papers with more than 1,000 citations are 6.3 times as likely to come from teams as from individuals.
Connection to the team principle
This supports the second half of the principle: the bigger the task, the more a team pays off. The caveat belongs here too. The study shows a correlation, not a cause. The authors themselves point to other possible explanations, such as specialization, greater capital requirements and changed authorship conventions. And citations measure impact, not quality.
Two Detectors, 3,002 Kilometers
Situation
On September 14, 2015, at 09:50:45 UTC, the two LIGO detectors in Hanford and Livingston make the first direct measurement of a gravitational wave. The two facilities are 3,002 kilometers apart. Albert Einstein had predicted such waves in 1916. One of the first to notice the signal is Marco Drago at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The discovery is announced on February 11, 2016. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration was founded in 1997 under Barry Barish; its first spokesperson was Rainer Weiss. Today it has more than 1,600 researchers at more than 150 institutions.
Connection to the team principle
Here the necessity is built into the experimental setup itself. The measurement is taken at two distant sites at once, and the signal is spotted at a third. Almost a hundred years separate prediction and measurement. A task like this cannot be solved by one person working harder. It demands many people in many places.
Three Laureates, 5,154 Authors
Situation
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to three people: Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. The 2015 CERN paper takes the opposite route. ATLAS and CMS list everyone involved, because they cannot divide the credit fairly. The previous record was held by a 2008 CMS paper, the first to exceed 3,000 authors.
Connection to the team principle
The two pictures belong together. The work has long been teamwork; the honors often still go to a few names. This is no criticism of the laureates. It shows how hard it is to see a team achievement for what it is and to give it its due – in science as in any company.
The Limit: Bigger Does Not Mean Better
Situation
In 2019, Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang and James A. Evans publish an analysis of more than 65 million papers, patents and software products in the journal Nature. Their finding: small teams tend to produce disruptive ideas, while large teams build on and refine existing ones. Both are needed.
Connection to the team principle
The principle says: the bigger the task, the more a team pays off. It does not say: the bigger the team, the better. A big task means a team is needed – not that it should have as many heads as possible. How big it can afford to be is a separate question.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Expect the tasks in your field to grow. What one specialist could handle alone ten years ago often takes several today.
- For every project, check whether you need knowledge from more than one discipline. If you do, that is a strong sign you need a team.
- Don’t confuse the size of the task with the size of the team. Justify every additional member with a contribution that would otherwise be missing.
- Agree early on how you and your team will share credit. Who gets credited at the end helps determine who signs up next time.
- Keep room for small groups to work on new ideas, even when the large team carries the main load.
Summary
Drawing on 19.9 million papers, Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones and Brian Uzzi show that teams are replacing the single author in almost every field and are cited more often. LIGO and CERN show what this looks like on a grand scale: two detectors, thousands of contributors, a 24-page author list. This supports the Team Principle of Necessity: a team pays off only when the task is bigger than any one person – and the bigger the task, the more it pays off. The research by Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang and James A. Evans marks the limit: the task justifies the team, not its headcount.