Executive Summary
Although individual investigator research continues to receive funding and yield results, increased complexity and competition have pressured researchers to collaborate to generate solutions to large-scale, real-world problems. This led to the emergence of team science, which Cooke and Hilton (2015, 2) define as “research conducted by more than one individual in an interdependent fashion, including research conducted by small teams and larger groups.” Such collaboration has become the norm in almost all scientific fields and resulted in the creation of a new field of inquiry called the science of team science (SciTS), which seeks to understand cross-disciplinary research "by examining the processes by which teams organize, communicate and conduct research” (Falk-Krzesinski, Contractor, Fiore, Hall, Kane, Keyton, Klein, Spring, Stokols, and Trochim 2011, 146).
The SciTS literature emphasizes the potential benefits of team science—including innovation, novel findings, and high-impact research—but also highlights the barriers to faculty engagement and the challenges that research teams face. Faculty training and incentive structures are rarely aligned with team science, and large and diverse research teams often struggle to establish norms and expectations, communicate effectively, align goals, and integrate knowledge and findings.
While the body of scholarly research on team science offers few hard-and-fast solutions to the challenges associated with research collaboration, it does provide valuable frameworks that university leaders can use to contextualize team-based research on campus, diagnose current collaborative patterns and needs at the institution, and develop a strategy to encourage and support research teams.
This brief summarizes and organizes key findings from over 20 sources and 500 pages of scholarship and publications on research teams. It is designed to help chief research officers (CROs) and other university leaders quickly…