Speed and impact of team science during urgent societal events

TL;DR

This study analyzes how team size influences the speed and impact of scientific publications during urgent societal events, revealing that larger teams tend to be more impactful and faster, but with diminishing or curvilinear returns.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of team dynamics and publication impact during urgent societal crises, highlighting optimal team sizes for rapid and impactful science.

Findings

Larger teams are more impactful and quicker to publish during crises.

Impact and speed show diminishing or curvilinear returns with increasing team size.

Results are robust across 48 societal events over two decades.

Abstract

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.