发表机构
Princeton University; Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学; 普林斯顿大学保罗和玛西娅·怀特斯当代中国中心）
机构由 AI 辅助整理，请以论文原文为准。AI 中文总结
本研究通过分析约6000万篇论文，指出小团队颠覆性优势是测量假象，提出参考稳健度量，证明大型团队更具颠覆性。
AI 中文摘要
现代科学已坚定地转向更大规模、更具协作性的研究团队。然而，一项具有影响力的2019年研究报告称，小团队比大团队更具颠覆性，这一结论既难以与众所周知的协作日益增强的趋势相协调，也难以与那些获得诺贝尔奖等广泛认可的颠覆性研究背后不成比例的大型团队相协调。在此，我们表明，所报告的小团队的颠覆性优势在很大程度上是测量假象，而非关于团队的事实。通过分析约6000万篇科学出版物，我们发现较大的团队引用更多参考文献，且标准的颠覆性指数会随着参考文献列表的延长而机械性地下降。在团队规模之间均衡引用计数分布，会在该指数自身的框架内逆转负梯度。每次仅针对一篇参考文献评估每篇论文，可得出一种对参考文献稳健的度量，该度量在六个独立策划的基准（包括诺贝尔奖）中，比标准颠覆性指数更清晰、更一致地区分公认的突破性论文与普通论文。在此经过验证的度量下，科学颠覆性在四个科学领域以及从1970年代到2010年代的每个十年中，均随团队规模的增大而增强。对于科学出版物，我们得出结论：大型团队更具颠覆性，而非更不具颠覆性。
英文摘要
Modern science has moved decisively toward larger and more collaborative research teams. Yet an influential 2019 study reported that small teams are more disruptive than large teams, a conclusion difficult to reconcile with both the well-known trend toward increasing collaboration and the disproportionately large teams behind widely recognized disruptive research, such as work that has been awarded Nobel Prizes. Here we show that the reported disruptive advantage of small teams is largely an artifact of measurement rather than a fact about teams. Analyzing about 60 million scientific publications, we find that larger teams cite more references and that the standard disruption index declines mechanically as reference lists lengthen. Equalizing reference-count distributions across team sizes reverses the negative gradient within the index's own framework. Evaluating each paper against one reference at a time yields a reference-robust measure that distinguishes recognized breakthroughs from ordinary papers more sharply and more consistently than the standard disruption index across six independently curated benchmarks, including the Nobel Prize. Under this validated measurement, scientific disruption increases with team size across four scientific domains and in every decade from the 1970s to the 2010s. For scientific publications, we conclude that larger teams are more, not less, disruptive.
Comments36 pages, 18 figures
