How to build up big team science: A practical guide for large-scale collaborations

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of Big Team Science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage, and participate in these collaborations. In this paper, we integrate insights from a multidisciplinary set of BTS initiatives to provide a how-to guide for BTS. We first discuss initial considerations for launching a BTS project, such as building the team, identifying leadership, governance, tools, and open science approaches. We then turn to issues related to running and completing a BTS project, such as study design, ethical approvals, and issues related to data collection, management, and analysis. Finally, we address topics that present special challenges for BTS, including authorship decisions, collaborative writing, and team decision making.

Poor hypotheses and research waste in biology: learning from a theory crisis in psychology

“…This publication introduces the idea of 'MeRIT' (Methods Reporting with Initials for Transparency) -how to acknowledge the methodological contributions of authors in more detail (www.merit.help), complementing widely adopted CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy; [106]). We created MeRIT to facilitate team science where providing appropriate credits to each team member can become an issue [107,108].…”

Challenges and Promises of Big Team Comparative Cognition

“…Similarly, BTS projects prioritize transparency by embracing and promoting open science practices in ways that can mitigate issues of reproducibility, such as pre-registering hypotheses, research design and analyses, and openly sharing data and materials. Through collaborative efforts, BTS optimizes labour distribution and fosters communication and networking across institutions and geographic borders, thus helping to build and consolidate global partnerships (Baumgartner et al, 2023).…”

“…In the current scientific ecosystem, participating in BTS is under-incentivized. Similar to other large-scale initiatives, BTS projects can be slow, are difficult to secure funding for, and are not perceived to be as valuable for career advancement as single-author or small-group papers (Baumgartner et al, 2023). These drawbacks are particularly costly for early-career researchers facing pressure to land tenure-track jobs, establish a research group, and define their independent intellectual contributions to the field.…”

Starting and sustaining fruitful collaborations in psychology

“…The size of collaborative teams has grown over the past few decades, with larger teams developing ideas and smaller teams advancing the scientific literature through disruptions of ideas and paradigm shifts (Wu et al., 2019). Recent writing in this area has focused on the proliferation, possibilities, and unique challenges of Big Team Science—very large team collaborations in which researchers combine their resources to examine broad, shared questions of interest (e.g., Baumgartner et al., 2023; Coles et al., 2022, 2023; Forscher et al., 2019, 2023; ManyBabies Consortium; Psychological Science Accelerator).…”