The science of team science (SciTS): An emerging and evolving field of interdisciplinary collaboration

Abstract

In recent years, collaboration within a team to solve complicated scientific and social problems has attracted growing popularity. In particular, many complex challenges and opportunities require expertise and skills across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries. However, rapid growth in the demand for scientific collaboration has outpaced changes in the factors needed to support scientific teams. Also, scientific results are not simply a combination of different working results; understanding how teams work and what causes them to fail or succeed is of the utmost importance. Thus, the Science of Team Science (SciTS), an emerging interdisciplinary research area, has emerged as a way of understanding and managing the circumstances that facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of large-scale cross-disciplinary, collaborative research, training, and translational initiatives. SciTS integrates various quantitative and qualitative research methods and is still advancing in its sophistication. Using bibliometric and information visualization methods, this paper clarifies the concepts and connotations of teams and team science. It sets out important events in the emergence and development of SciTS and summarizes the characteristics of the SciTS literature, identifying seven main research areas. The paper concludes with a discussion on the challenges facing the future advancement of SciTS and corresponding recommendations for breaking through these bottlenecks. Our goal is to deepen researchers’ understanding of SciTS and better inform the policies and practices that govern SciTS for more effective team science.