Knowledge Increasingly Generated by Teams Rather than Solo Artists

Do great breakthroughs in knowledge occur as a result of a brilliant mind working alone, perhaps through some brilliant flash of insight? Or, is knowledge creation fundamentally a collaborative endeavor? Has the process of knowledge creation changed in recent years? Has it become more collaborative? Northwestern scholars Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin Jones, and Brian Uzzi studied these questions and have written a paper titled, "The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge." 

The authors examined nearly 20 million articles from the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. These articles include work from a range of fields including science, engineering, social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. They also studied more than 2 million patents issued during the time that these articles were published. 

The scholars report that, "For science and engineering, social sciences, and patents, there has been a substantial shift towards collective research. In the sciences, team size has grown steadily each year and nearly doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper over 45 years." The authors found that solo authors tend to be more prevalent in the arts and the humanities, though collaboration has increased there as well. Moreover, the authors discovered "a broad tendency for teams to produce more highly cited work than individual authors" - a finding true across all fields. In fact, that trend toward higher citations of collaborative work has picked up in recent years. 

In sum, collaboration has become more important and more prevalent over time in the knowledge generation process. This statement represents more than just a well-worn cliche; the empirical data support this claim in clear and convincing fashion.