Creativity in scientific teams: Unpacking novelty and impact

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe increasing dominance of team science highlights the importance of understanding the effects of team composition on the creativity of research results. In this paper, we analyze the effect of team size, and field and task variety on creativity. Furthermore, we unpack two facets of creativity in science: novelty and impact. We find that increasing team size has an inverted-U shaped relation with novelty. We also find that the size-novelty relationship is largely due to the relation between size and team field or task variety, consistent with the information processing perspective. On the other hand, team size has a continually increasing relation with the likelihood of a high-impact paper. Furthermore, variety does not have a direct effect on impact, net of novelty. This study develops our understanding of team science and highlights the need for a governance approach to scientific work. We also advance the creativity literature by providing an ex ante objective bibliometric measure that distinguishes novelty from impact, and illustrate the distinct team-level drivers of each. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings.

Interdisciplinarity and Impact: Distinct Effects of Variety, Balance and Disparity

“…Again, for these estimations, we fix journal fixed effect at 0, international at 0, and all other variables at their means. We observe that long-term citations increase at an increasing rate with variety, which is in line with the information processing perspective, which suggests that cognitive variety is very important for creative and innovative work [47][48][49]. For interdisciplinary research, integrating knowledge from more disciplines contributes to potentially more broadly useful outcomes.…”

Teaching originality? Common habits behind creative production in science and arts

“…In addition, the group size itself may have negative effects too. For instance, a recent study suggests that, in science, novelty shows an inverse U-shaped relation to group size (number of authors on a paper), with the decline at larger group sizes possibly resulting from coordination problems in sorting out the best ideas (Lee et al 2015).…”

Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators

“…They find that papers with both high novelty and conventionality are more likely to become top cited. Lee, Walsh, and Wang (2015) adapt the Uzzi et al (2013) measure for their study of creativity in scientific teams and find that the effect of team characteristics on novelty is different from its effect on impact of the publication produced by the team.…”

“…First, we control for specific scientific field effects, by including the complete set of dummies for the 251 WoS subject categories. Second, we control for the number of references made in the focal paper, which might increase both the likelihood of having new combinations and the number of received citations (Bornmann, Leydesdorff, & Wang, 2014;Lee et al, 2015). Third, we take into account the size and nature of the collaborative effort, which might affect both novelty and impact (Adams, Black, Clemmons, & Stephan, 2005;Katz & Hicks, 1997;Lee et al, 2015).…”