What is Team Science?

And why does it matter?

Over the past few decades, the problems we are facing have become more complex, requiring scientists to work together in teams to truly understand and address that complexity. Solutions to challenges like finding cures for cancers or the climate emergency need multiple perspectives, methods, and data sets. The era of the lone scientist toiling away in their lab having eureka moments that change the trajectory of a field is long gone, if it ever truly existed. A 2007 analysis from Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi found that the number of papers and patents published by teams increased dramatically from 1960-2000.

All that said, the term “Team Science” has been used in a variety of ways and seems to mean different things to different people. Here, I define team science as a combination of collaboration and cross-disciplinary scientific research focused on generating new, generalizable knowledge. That might look like an epidemiologist and a virologist working together to explore how the HPV vaccine is impacting cervical cancer rates in a certain community or a data scientist, an engineer, and a gerontologist collaborating to find ways to use sensors to prevent falls among the elderly.

What *isn’t* team science? In order to provide tools, resources, and trainings that work, it’s equally important to understand what is excluded from this definition. These exclusions aren’t hard and fast rules, but I don’t generally consider work being done within one lab or within one discipline to be team science. A single lab generally has a hierarchy that can mitigate some of the challenges of team science that come from shared leadership, while unidisciplinary research can avoid some of the challenges of cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing. (Though as researchers become more specialized and disciplines themselves become more complex, this may be evolving.)  I also don’t include multidisciplinary clinical care teams or any team that isn’t conducting scientific research with the intent of generating generalizable new knowledge. Unless these teams are conducting knowledge-generating research, they don’t fall into my definition of science teams.

Over the next few months, I’ll be exploring the opportunities and challenges of Team Science, presenting Team Science as a methodology akin to biostatistics that impacts how you do research and, thus, your scientific outcomes, and how you can improve your approach to conducting team-based research.

Got a question about Team Science? Subscribers can email me at theteamsciencelab@substack.com, and I may answer your question in this space!