Large scientific teams are more, not less, disruptive
Abstract
Modern science has moved decisively toward larger and more collaborative research teams. Yet an influential 2019 study reported that small teams are more disruptive than large teams, a conclusion difficult to reconcile with both the well-known trend toward increasing collaboration and the disproportionately large teams behind widely recognized disruptive research, such as work that has been awarded Nobel Prizes. Here we show that the reported disruptive advantage of small teams is largely an artifact of measurement rather than a fact about teams. Analyzing about 60 million scientific publications, we find that larger teams cite more references and that the standard disruption index declines mechanically as reference lists lengthen. Equalizing reference-count distributions across team sizes reverses the negative gradient within the index's own framework. Evaluating each paper against one reference at a time yields a reference-robust measure that distinguishes recognized breakthroughs from ordinary papers more sharply and more consistently than the standard disruption index across six independently curated benchmarks, including the Nobel Prize. Under this validated measurement, scientific disruption increases with team size across four scientific domains and in every decade from the 1970s to the 2010s. For scientific publications, we conclude that larger teams are more, not less, disruptive.
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BibTeX
@misc{huang2026large,
title = {{Large scientific teams are more, not less, disruptive}},
author = {Junming Huang and Yu Xie},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.07329},
eprint = {2610.07329},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07329},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Large scientific teams are more, not less, disruptive
AU - Junming Huang
AU - Yu Xie
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.07329
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07329
AB - Modern science has moved decisively toward larger and more collaborative research teams. Yet an influential 2019 study reported that small teams are more disruptive than large teams, a conclusion difficult to reconcile with both the well-known trend toward increasing collaboration and the disproportionately large teams behind widely recognized disruptive research, such as work that has been awarded Nobel Prizes. Here we show that the reported disruptive advantage of small teams is largely an artifact of measurement rather than a fact about teams. Analyzing about 60 million scientific publications, we find that larger teams cite more references and that the standard disruption index declines mechanically as reference lists lengthen. Equalizing reference-count distributions across team sizes reverses the negative gradient within the index's own framework. Evaluating each paper against one reference at a time yields a reference-robust measure that distinguishes recognized breakthroughs from ordinary papers more sharply and more consistently than the standard disruption index across six independently curated benchmarks, including the Nobel Prize. Under this validated measurement, scientific disruption increases with team size across four scientific domains and in every decade from the 1970s to the 2010s. For scientific publications, we conclude that larger teams are more, not less, disruptive.
ER -