B. Teamwork in Science
Knowledge accumulation further suggests a natural “death of the Renaissance man”
effect, where the individual scholar is expert in a narrowing share of scientific and technical
ideas as science advances. Narrowing expertise will reduce the capacities of individual
innovators to (i) draw on knowledge in other fields in their creative process and (ii) implement
broad ideas by themselves. Narrowing expertise thus suggests fundamental changes in the
organization of innovative activity, with innovators not only being more specialized but
increasingly working in teams. This section documents the second major dynamic in science: a
general shift to team production and associated rise of teamwork as the locus of higher impact
ideas.
Figure 3: The Ubiquitous Rise in Teamwork
Year
Notes: For papers, the figure plots the mean number of authors per paper across 19 million journal articles indexed
by the Institute of Scientific Information’s Web of Science database. The Science and Engineering category pools
articles from 171 different sub-fields while the Social Sciences category pools articles from 54 sub-fields, as indexed
by the Web of Science. For patents, the figure plots the mean number of inventors listed in each patent, using the
NBER patent database. For further details see Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi (2007) and Jones (2009).
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