Why people work together

Abstract

Growing team sizes across many fields have contributed to the rapid advancement in science and technology. As technological innovation becomes more critical in today’s world, understanding how team size affects the quality and level of innovation is imperative, especially in the research field. Previous research has primarily focus on larger team size as the main driving factor for better research quality and thus has been unable to consider for other potential elements that contribute to the quality. This paper aims to study whether larger teams produce better quality research papers and if there are other factors influencing the quality. An empirical study was carried out as we collected both cross-sectional data and panel data from the Nature’s journal database to decompose the correlation between team size and research quality with key variables such as number of citations, number of authors, and a few confounding variables. A logit regression model and fixed effects regression models were used, and results showed that an increase in team size did contribute to an increase in the number of citations and hence the quality of the research papers as well. Although the effect of team size on citations was apparent, the more influential factor of research paper was the number of accesses that research papers get. Therefore, these results suggest that it is always recommended to find more people to work together to produce a quality research paper. Based on this, the concept of team size needs to be further delved into as there might be a ‘golden’ number of members a team needs to have to achieve optimal quality.