Critical mass and the dependency of research quality on group size

TL;DR

This paper models academic research groups as complex systems, revealing that intra-group interactions significantly influence research quality and identifying critical group sizes that optimize research performance.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical model demonstrating phase transition phenomena in research groups and quantifies critical mass for various academic disciplines.

Findings

Intra-group interactions dominate research quality.

Critical mass thresholds vary across disciplines.

Supporting medium-sized groups enhances overall research performance.

Abstract

Academic research groups are treated as complex systems and their cooperative behaviour is analysed from a mathematical and statistical viewpoint. Contrary to the naive expectation that the quality of a research group is simply given by the mean calibre of its individual scientists, we show that intra-group interactions play a dominant role. Our model manifests phenomena akin to phase transitions which are brought about by these interactions, and which facilitate the quantification of the notion of critical mass for research groups. We present these critical masses for many academic areas. A consequence of our analysis is that overall research performance of a given discipline is improved by supporting medium-sized groups over large ones, while small groups must strive to achieve critical mass.