484 Rethinking Team Science metrics through collaborative guideposts

Objectives/Goals: Interdisciplinary teams are central to modern science, but measuring their success remains difficult. Traditional metrics like publications or citations often miss key contributions, such as community engagement, mentorship, and lasting collaboration. New approaches are needed to capture these goals. Methods/Study Population: We introduce a framework aligning success metrics with a team’s organizing priorities, illustrated through two contrasting models: Team A, a time-bound, community-focused group emphasizing rapid deliverables and public health partnerships, and Team B, a mentorship-driven, development-focused group prioritizing capacity building and long-term growth. These teams share a commitment to advancing translational research but differ in how they pursue these goals. Team A emphasized centralized coordination, shared ownership of goals, yielding timely scholarly outputs, and setting the stage for future collaborations. Team B prioritizes long-term development, sustained collaboration, and the mentorship of early-career faculty, even if traditional academic productivity metrics accrue more gradually. Results/Anticipated Results: These contrasting approaches raise an important question: how should success be defined and measured for teams with very different goals, structures, and outputs? From these cases, we derive four Collaborative Guideposts: Time Perspective, Unit of Assessment, Desired Outcomes, and Sustainability, which provide a systematic way to identify and select metrics that meaningfully capture a team’s contributions and impact. By offering a structured yet adaptable framework, these guideposts enable teams to track progress, monitor outcomes, and ensure alignment with their unique goals, operating environments, and stages of development. This approach contributes to advancing validated models of team science by providing a practical method for tailoring evaluation criteria to diverse collaborative contexts. Discussion/Significance of Impact: By grounding evaluation in team-specific goals, this framework supports more accurate assessments of collaborative impact. Guideposts provide a flexible structure to align metrics with context, guide discussions of outcomes, and evaluate teams on productivity, collaboration, mentorship, and long-term scientific progress.