Amanda L. Vogel

Assessing the Value of Team Science A Study Comparing Center- and Investigator- Initiated Grants

BACKGROUND Large cross-disciplinary scientific teams are becoming increasingly prominent in the conduct of research. PURPOSE This paper reports on a quasi-experimental longitudinal study conducted to compare bibliometric indicators of scientific collaboration, productivity, and impact of center-based transdisciplinary team science initiatives and traditional investigator-initiated grants in the same field. METHODS All grants began between 1994 and 2004 and up to 10 years of publication data were collected for each grant. Publication information was compiled and analyzed during the spring and summer of 2010. RESULTS Following an initial lag period, the transdisciplinary research center grants had higher overall publication rates than the investigator-initiated R01 (NIH Research Project Grant Program) grants. There were relatively uniform publication rates across the research center grants compared to dramatically dispersed publication rates among the R01 grants. On average, publications produced by the research center grants had greater numbers of coauthors but similar journal impact factors compared with publications produced by the R01 grants. CONCLUSIONS The lag in productivity among the transdisciplinary center grants was offset by their overall higher publication rates and average number of coauthors per publication, relative to investigator-initiated grants, over the 10-year comparison period. The findings suggest that transdisciplinary center grants create benefits for both scientific productivity and collaboration.

The team science toolkit

Introduction Research teams, ranging from pairs of collaborators to large networks, are becoming the dominant paradigm in knowledge production. Across all research fields, teams now produce more frequently cited and higher impact research than individual authors. This trend—known as “team science” or “team-based research”—has emerged as a strategy to address increasingly complex scientific problems, often by applying sophisticated conceptual and methodologic approaches that draw on multiple disciplines, fields, and professions. Science teams bring together collaborators with a combined set of expertise that is uniquely suited to address particular scientific problems in innovative and effective ways. These specialized teams may be large in size; may include collaborators distributed across geographic space and organizational boundaries and with expertise that spans multiple disciplines, fields, and professions; and may involve academic, community, and translational partners. These complexities contribute to the potential added value

Editorials and CommentaryThe Team Science Toolkit: Enhancing Research Collaboration Through Online Knowledge Sharing

Introduction Research teams, ranging from pairs of collaborators to large networks, are becoming the dominant paradigm in knowledge production. Across all research fields, teams now produce more frequently cited and higher impact research than individual authors. This trend—known as “team science” or “team-based research”—has emerged as a strategy to address increasingly complex scientific problems, often by applying sophisticated conceptual and methodologic approaches that draw on multiple disciplines, fields, and professions. Science teams bring together collaborators with a combined set of expertise that is uniquely suited to address particular scientific problems in innovative and effective ways. These specialized teams may be large in size; may include collaborators distributed across geographic space and organizational boundaries and with expertise that spans multiple disciplines, fields, and professions; and may involve academic, community, and translational partners. These complexities contribute to the potential added value

Integrating knowledge across domains to advance the science of health behavior: overcoming challenges and facilitating success

Health behaviors often co-occur and have common determinants at multiple levels (e.g., individual, relational, environmental). Nevertheless, research programs often examine single health behaviors without a systematic attempt to integrate knowledge across behaviors. This paper highlights the significant potential of cross-cutting behavioral research to advance our understanding of the mechanisms and causal factors that shape health behaviors. It also offers suggestions for how researchers could develop more effective interventions. We highlight barriers to such an integrative science along with potential steps that can be taken to address these barriers. With a more nuanced understanding of health behavior, redundancies in research can be minimized, and a stronger evidence base for the development of health behavior interventions can be realized.

News from NIH: resources for team-based research to more effectively address complex public health problems.

A perennial goal of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is “to foster fundamental creative discoveries, innovative research strategies and their applications as a basis for ultimately protecting and improving health” [1]. In response to this goal, an increasing number of initiatives have emerged to promote cross-disciplinary team-based research. Cross-disciplinary research approaches aim to integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines and perspectives to generate innovative solutions to real-world problems. Scholars have identified three main types of cross-disciplinary research approaches, multidisciplinary (MD), interdisciplinary (ID), and transdisciplinary (TD), each of which is characterized by an increasing level of disciplinary integration [2]. As research initiatives move along this continuum toward greater integration, they are increasingly likely to rely upon teambased research to develop, conceptualize, and implement research initiatives. The Science of Team Science (SciTS) field has emerged in response to the need to better understand the circumstances that facilitate or hinder effective team-based research and assess the outcomes of this approach for scientific productivity, innovation, and translational applications [3–5]. Over the past decade, NIH has provided leadership to support cross-disciplinary team-based research by: (1) advancing the SciTS field, (2) developing tools and resources to facilitate collaboration, and (3) funding team-based research.

The science of team science: A review of the empirical evidence and research gaps on collaboration in science.

Collaborations among researchers and across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries are vital to address increasingly complex challenges and opportunities in science and society. In addition, unprecedented technological advances create new opportunities to capitalize on a broader range of expertise and information in scientific collaborations. Yet rapid increases in the demand for scientific collaborations have outpaced changes in the factors needed to support teams in science, such as institutional structures and policies, scientific culture, and funding opportunities. The Science of Team Science (SciTS) field arose with the goal of empirically addressing questions from funding agencies, administrators, and scientists regarding the value of team science (TS) and strategies for successfully leading, engaging in, facilitating, and supporting science teams. Closely related fields have rich histories studying teams, groups, organizations, and management and have built a body of evidence for effective teaming in contexts such as industry and the military. Yet few studies had focused on science teams. Unique contextual factors within the scientific enterprise create an imperative to study these teams in context, and provide opportunities to advance understanding of other complex forms of collaboration. This review summarizes the empirical findings from the SciTS literature, which center around five key themes: the value of TS, team composition and its influence on TS performance, formation of science teams, team processes central to effective team functioning, and institutional influences on TS. Cross-cutting issues are discussed in the context of new research opportunities to further advance SciTS evidence and better inform policies and practices for effective TS.