Papers with fewer authors are more disruptive

[gleem]

Avoid large groups to be a disruptive scientist so says an article in Physics World. Big groups are more impactful having more citations than papers with fewer authors, building on current research and concentrating on near term goals.

"Evans told Physics World that he thinks smaller teams have more to gain and less to lose from disruption as they cannot compete with larger teams when it comes to building on previous work. This pushes them to explore possibilities that “don’t gel with but could disrupt” current scientific and technological trends. Evans says that clashes in large teams also reduce the number of ideas and steer members towards things they have in common."

 

[BillTre]

Big groups are more impactful having more citations than papers with fewer authors, building on current research and concentrating on near term goals.

Do citations by the (many) authors get counted in these citation counts?

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Do citations by the (many) authors get counted in these citation counts?

From the paper, published this week in Nature:

We further test the robustness of our results against several different definitions of the disruption measure, including the removal of self-citation links, exclusion of all but high-impact references and other variations (Extended Data Fig. 5g–i). Across all variations, our conclusions remain the same.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9