Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study the success of persistent teams. Challenging the idea that persistence alone drives success, we find that team freshness - new collaborations built on prior experience - is key to success. High impact research tends to emerge early in a team's lifespan. Analyzing complex team overlap, we find that teams open to new collaborative ties consistently produce better science. Specifically, team re-combinations that introduce new freshness impulses sustain success, while persistence impulses from experienced teams are linked to earlier impact. Together, freshness and persistence shape team success across collaboration stages.
Boekhout et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: