The interaction of inter-organizational diversity and team size, and the scientific impact of papers

Large teams are known to be more likely to publish highly cited papers, while small teams are known to be better at publishing highly disruptive papers. However, there is a lack of adequate theoretical understanding of the mechanisms by which scientific collaboration among researchers is related to the scientific impact of their papers. We investigated the mechanisms more closely by focusing on the interaction of inter-organizational diversity and team size in the process of team formation and knowledge dissemination. We analyzed 12,010,102 Web of Science papers and examined how inter-organizational diversity is associated with the relationship of team size with disruption and citations. As a result, we found that not only small teams, but also large teams with great inter-organizational diversity were able to disrupt science and technology effectively. We also found that large teams with greater inter-organizational diversity were more likely to produce highly cited papers. Our findings are robust and consistently observed regardless of publication year, team size, the number of references, and the degree of multidisciplinarity. These results have significant implications for researchers in selecting collaborators to achieve greater impact and for improving the qualitative efficiency of public research investments.