Kara L. Hall

The Science of Team Science Overview of the Field and Introduction to the Supplement

The science of team science encompasses an amalgam of conceptual and methodologic strategies aimed at understanding and enhancing the outcomes of large-scale collaborative research and training programs. This field has emerged rapidly in recent years, largely in response to growing concerns about the cost effectiveness of public- and private-sector investments in team-based science and training initiatives. The distinctive boundaries and substantive concerns of this field, however, have remained difficult to discern. An important challenge for the field is to characterize the science of team science more clearly in terms of its major theoretical, methodologic, and translational concerns. The articles in this supplement address this challenge, especially in the context of designing, implementing, and evaluating cross-disciplinary research initiatives. This introductory article summarizes the major goals and organizing themes of the supplement, draws links between the constituent articles, and identifies new areas of study within the science of team science.

The Ecology of Team Science Understanding Contextual Influences on Transdisciplinary Collaboration

Increased public and private investments in large-scale team science initiatives over the past two decades have underscored the need to better understand how contextual factors influence the effectiveness of transdisciplinary scientific collaboration. Toward that goal, the findings from four distinct areas of research on team performance and collaboration are reviewed: (1) social psychological and management research on the effectiveness of teams in organizational and institutional settings; (2) studies of cyber-infrastructures (i.e., computer-based infrastructures) designed to support transdisciplinary collaboration across remote research sites; (3) investigations of community-based coalitions for health promotion; and (4) studies focusing directly on the antecedents, processes, and outcomes of scientific collaboration within transdisciplinary research centers and training programs. The empirical literature within these four domains reveals several contextual circumstances that either facilitate or hinder team performance and collaboration. A typology of contextual influences on transdisciplinary collaboration is proposed as a basis for deriving practical guidelines for designing, managing, and evaluating successful team science initiatives.

A Multi-Level Systems Perspective for the Science of Team Science

Understanding how teams function is vital because they are increasingly dominating the production of high-impact science. This Commentary describes recent research progress and professional developments in the study of scientific teamwork, an area of inquiry termed the “science of team science” (SciTS, pronounced “sahyts”). It proposes a systems perspective that incorporates a mixed-methods approach to SciTS that is commensurate with the conceptual, methodological, and translational complexities addressed within the SciTS field. The theoretically grounded and practically useful framework is intended to integrate existing and future lines of SciTS research to facilitate the field’s evolution as it addresses key challenges spanning macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis.

Moving the Science of Team Science Forward: Collaboration and Creativity

Teams of scientists representing diverse disciplines are often brought together for purposes of better understanding and, ultimately, resolving urgent public health and environmental problems. Likewise, the emerging field of the science of team science draws on diverse disciplinary perspectives to better understand and enhance the processes and outcomes of scientific collaboration. In this supplement to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, leading scholars in the nascent field of team science have come together with a common goal of advancing the field with new models, methods, and measures. This summary article highlights key themes reflected in the supplement and identifies several promising directions for future research organized around the following broad challenges: (1) operationalizing cross-disciplinary team science and training more clearly; (2) conceptualizing the multiple dimensions of readiness for team science; (3) ensuring the sustainability of transdisciplinary team science; (4) developing more effective models and strategies for training transdisciplinary scientists; (5) creating and validating improved models, methods, and measures for evaluating team science; and (6) fostering transdisciplinary cross-sector partnerships. A call to action is made to leaders from the research, funding, and practice sectors to embrace strategies of creativity and innovation in a collective effort to move the field forward, which may not only advance the science of team science but, ultimately, public health science and practice.

Measuring collaboration and transdisciplinary integration in team science.

PURPOSE As the science of team science evolves, the development of measures that assess important processes related to working in transdisciplinary teams is critical. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present the psychometric properties of scales measuring collaborative processes and transdisciplinary integration. METHODS Two hundred-sixteen researchers and research staff participating in the Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Centers (TTURC) Initiative completed the TTURC researcher survey. Confirmatory-factor analyses were used to verify the hypothesized factor structures. Descriptive data pertinent to these scales and their associations with other constructs were included to further examine the properties of the scales. RESULTS Overall, the hypothesized-factor structures, with some minor modifications, were validated. A total of four scales were developed, three to assess collaborative processes (satisfaction with the collaboration, impact of collaboration, trust and respect) and one to assess transdisciplinary integration. All scales were found to have adequate internal consistency (i.e., Cronbach alphas were all >0.70); were correlated with intermediate markers of collaborations (e.g., the collaboration and transdisciplinary-integration scales were positively associated with the perception of a centers making good progress in creating new methods, new science and models, and new interventions); and showed some ability to detect group differences. CONCLUSIONS This paper provides valid tools that can be utilized to examine the underlying processes of team science--an important step toward advancing the science of team science.

The collaboration readiness of transdisciplinary research teams and centers findings from the National Cancer Institute's TREC Year-One evaluation study.

Growing interest in promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration among health scientists has prompted several federal agencies, including the NIH, to establish large, multicenter initiatives intended to foster collaborative research and training. In order to assess whether these initiatives are effective in promoting scientific collaboration that ultimately results in public health improvements, it is necessary to develop new strategies for evaluating research processes and products as well as the longer-term societal outcomes associated with these programs. Ideally, evaluative measures should be administered over the entire course of large initiatives, including their near-term and later phases. The present study focuses on the development of new tools for assessing the readiness for collaboration among health scientists at the outset (during the first year) of their participation in the National Cancer Institutes Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer (TREC) initiative. Indexes of collaborative readiness, along with additional measures of near-term collaborative processes, were administered as part of the TREC Year-One evaluation survey. Additionally, early progress toward scientific collaboration and integration was assessed, using a protocol for evaluating written research products. Results from the Year-One survey and the ratings of written products provide evidence of cross-disciplinary collaboration among participants during the first year of the initiative, and also reveal opportunities for enhancing collaborative processes and outcomes during subsequent phases of the project. The implications of these findings for future evaluations of team science initiatives are discussed.

Advancing the Science of Team Science

The First Annual International Science of Team Science (SciTS) Conference was held in Chicago, IL April 22–24, 2010. This article presents a summary of the Conference proceedings. Clin Trans Sci 2010; Volume 3: 263–266.

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.

Mapping a research agenda for the science of team science

An increase in cross-disciplinary, collaborative team science initiatives over the last few decades has spurred interest by multiple stakeholder groups in empirical research on scientific teams, giving rise to an emergent field referred to as the science of team science (SciTS). This study employed a collaborative team science concept-mapping evaluation methodology to develop a comprehensive research agenda for the SciTS field. Its integrative mixed-methods approach combined group process with statistical analysis to derive a conceptual framework that identifies research areas of team science and their relative importance to the emerging SciTS field. The findings from this concept-mapping project constitute a lever for moving SciTS forward at theoretical, empirical, and translational levels.

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