China may need to support more small teams in scientific research
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Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. Large teams have demonstrated a clear advantage over small teams in applying for research funding, performing complicated research tasks and producing research works with high impact. Recent research, however, shows that both large and small teams have their own merits. Small teams tend to expand the frontier of knowledge by creating disruptive research outcomes, while large teams are more apt to work in the established field and develop existing problems. Given different roles of big and small teams in research, the extent to which a country's scientific work is carried out by big/small teams is of great importance. Here, we analyze over 26 million papers from Web of Science published from 2000 to 2017. We find that China's research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world. It is indeed a global trend that more papers are done by big teams. However, the drop in small team output is much steeper in China. More importantly, as research teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative works does not increase as much as that in other countries. Papers by big teams tend to receive more citations, but this alone is insufficient to explain the dominance of big teams in China, because the citation boost is roughly the same in every country. However, using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small team works than the National Science Foundation of U.S. (NSF) does, implying that big teams are more preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which urges a need to balance small and big teams.
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