Team Science Perspectives and Approaches

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).