Project
Microfoundations of scientific teams
Despite teams being the primary vehicle for conducting scientific research, the premise of this project is that it is not trivial to assemble effective teams. There is no doubt that teams are essential for contemporary science, primarily because of the need for bundling diverse expertise to tackle problems at the knowledge frontier (Wuchty et al., 2007; Jones, 2009; Stephan, 2012;Fortunato et al., 2018; Liu et al. , 2020), and to address societal challenges like climate change or inequality (Ledford, 2015). Yet, the still largely anecdotal evidence suggests that interdisciplinary research (IDR) continues to face challenges, such as lower odds of funding success (Rylance, 2015; Bromham et al., 2016), longer time horizons to generate impact (Van Noorden, 2015), a relative scarcity of highly ranked journals that publish IDR (Rafols et al., 2012), difficulties in organizing its peer review (Bammer, 2016; McLeish & Strang, 2016), and the ambiguous impact on researchers’ recognition and career development (Millar, 2013; Gewin, 2014). The overall objective of this proposal is to provide a comprehensive theoretical foundation for the mechanisms behind these problems and to empirically test generated hypotheses.