The prevalence, impact, and disruptiveness of big team science

Big team science endeavors represent the largest investments of social capital in science. Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of their prevalence, impact, and disruptiveness. Here, this gap is filled via an analysis of 29 million papers published over 200+ years. Results indicate that big team science is increasingly frequent – yet extremely rare – and generally focuses on building upon (vs. disrupting) lines of research. Consistent with collective intelligence theories, unusually large teams tend to have unusually large impact, in terms of median yearly citations. However, big teams navigate a diseconomy of scale, wherein adding co-authors yields diminishing increases in citations. Taken together, results uncover the nature of big team science: unusual endeavors wherein researchers endure inefficiencies to make unusually high impact advancements to existing lines of thinking.