Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 11

Given that individual scholars and inventors choose whether to work alone or in teams,
the increase in teamwork suggests that innovators find teamwork increasingly worthwhile. That
teams might have some advantage is further shown in Table 3. First, we see that team-authored
papers published between 1995 and 2005 have received more than twice as many citations on
average than solo-authored papers. This large citation advantage appears in both Science and
Engineering papers and Social Sciences papers. Moreover, when looking at “home run” papers,
defined here as those with at least 100 citations, team authored papers are 4.25-4.57 times as
likely to produce such “home runs”. In patenting, meanwhile, teams are associated with an 18%
increase in mean citations received and a 65% increase in the probability of a “home run” patent.

Table 3: Team versus Solo Impact

Notes: This table considers all papers published in the 1995-2005 period (as indexed by the ISI Web
of Science and counting citations received through 2007), and all U.S. patents produced in the 1990-
1999 period (and counting citations received from other U.S. patents through 2007).

Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi (2007) further show that the team advantage in citations appears
in nearly all sub-fields of Science and Engineering papers, Social Sciences papers, and patents.
Moreover, the citation advantage of teams over solo work, and teams’ relative probability of
home runs, are increasing with time, so that team production appears increasingly privileged in
its citation impact. In a number of fields, the team citation advantage reverses what had been a
solo-inventor advantage in the 1950s, which emphasizes the changing nature of science and the
decline of solo researchers as the locus of the most cited ideas.

In sum, we see general shifts toward teamwork in the production of knowledge, and
especially in the production of the most highly cited ideas.

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