Freshness, Persistence and Success of Scientific Teams

TL;DR

This study analyzes a vast dataset of scientific publications to understand how team freshness and persistence influence research success, revealing that new collaborations and early impact are crucial for high-impact science.

Contribution

It introduces a network-driven approach to quantify team freshness and persistence, demonstrating their combined effect on scientific success across different collaboration stages.

Findings

Team freshness, driven by new collaborations, is key to success.

High-impact research occurs early in a team's lifespan.

Teams that incorporate new ties sustain better scientific outcomes.

Abstract

Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study the success of persistent teams. Challenging the idea that persistence alone drives success, we find that team freshness - new collaborations built on prior experience - is key to success. High impact research tends to emerge early in a team's lifespan. Analyzing complex team overlap, we find that teams open to new collaborative ties consistently produce better science. Specifically, team re-combinations that introduce new freshness impulses sustain success, while persistence impulses from experienced teams are linked to earlier impact. Together, freshness and persistence shape team success across collaboration stages.