Speed and impact of team science during urgent societal events
This research addresses the problem of optimizing scientific collaboration for rapid and impactful responses during crises, such as pandemics or technological releases, though it is incremental in building on existing bibliometric methods.
The study analyzed over 2 million publications following 48 urgent societal events, finding that larger teams were both more impactful and quicker to publish, with diminishing or curvilinear returns in citations and speed as team size increased.
Urgent societal events demand scientific responses that are both rapid and impactful. Through an adversarial collaboration, we connected bibliometric databases to evaluate the speed and impact of over 2 million scientific publications in the three years following 48 urgent societal events. A pilot analysis of three cases -- the 2022 release of ChatGPT, the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks -- yielded unexpected patterns: larger teams were not only more impactful but also quicker to publish. More precisely, increases in team size were associated with (a) initial increases, but eventual diminishing returns in academic citations, (b) curvilinear returns in news and policy document citations, and (c) curvilinear returns in terms of how quickly papers were published. In other words, there are points where further increases in team sizes are either marginally helpful (diminishing returns) or counterproductive (curvilinear returns). To evaluate robustness, we pre-registered a broader test covering 45 additional events spanning two decades.