2024  VOLUME 4  

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Close-knit teams foster complex research: A case study of Physics

AUTHOR

Yuxia Chu, Hongyi Zhu, Yujia Zhai*

ABSTRACT

This study explores the association between team familiarity and research topic complexity within a framework of teamwork and complex system science. We introduce a novel' individual connectedness' metric to gauge team familiarity. Research topics are extracted via BERTopic, creating a topic matrix that determines research complexity. Through ANOVA and quantile regression, we analyze the association between team familiarity and research topic complexity across different team sizes. Key findings include the pivotal role of the third author in collaborations and the observation that team familiarity tends to increase over time. This growth is more pronounced in larger teams than in smaller ones. Moreover, larger team sizes correlate with heightened topic complexity. A notable trend is the positive relationship between team familiarity and topic complexity. Different complexity quartiles exhibit diverse rates of familiarity growth, with more complex topics linked to rapid familiarity increases. To optimize teamwork, managing team growth, enhancing member capabilities, and strategically boosting topic complexity are crucial.

KEYWORDS

Team collaboration; Individual connectedness; Team size; Team familiarity; Topic complexity

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