Journal of Economic Perspectives | 2021
The Rise of Research Teams: Benefits and Costs in Economics
Abstract
E conomics research is increasingly a team activity: economists increasingly coauthor their papers, and these coauthored papers have a large and increasing impact advantage. This “rise of teams” raises issues for individual researchers and for the field. On the one hand, coauthorship brings benefits, allowing individuals to combine perspectives, knowledge, skills, and effort in fruitful ways. But it also imposes costs; for example, coauthorship divides and obscures credit among the participants, which can undermine individual career progression. This paper synthesizes recent literature to weigh the benefits and costs of research teams. The findings provide guidance to individual researchers themselves, and the institutions that support them, in fostering high-impact research and productive research careers. The paper begins by documenting the rapid rise of team authorship in economics. For example, while papers with two or more authors constituted only 19 percent of economics journal articles in 1960, this share rose to 44 percent in 2000 and 74 percent in 2018. Moreover, team-authored papers in economics have increasing impact advantages over solo-authored papers. By 2010, a team was three times more likely to produce a highly cited paper than a solo author, an advantage that has grown steadily with time. These shifts appear not only within every subfield of economics, but also in virtually all fields of science, social science, and patenting. The Rise of Research Teams: Benefits and Costs in Economics