What is a team in science?
I began in the wrong direction since I assumed that the most basic concept to define was ‘team’
The common-English definition for team in the Cambridge Dictionary is: ‘a number of people or animals who do something together as a group (1)’. So, there we have, another related-term: group. The same dictionary defines group as: ‘a number of people or things that are put together or considered as a unit’ (1).
The most striking difference between a team and a group is that a team is composed only of animals (including humans), whereas a group can be composed of things, like a Formula 1 car or a paper ream, or people; however it excludes non-human animals.
Thus, a set of humans can form both groups and teams, whereas a set of non-human animals can form a team but not a group. Conversely, things can form a group but not a team.
By excluding things from teams, teams differ from groups because teams are composed of only living beings. In sum, the adjusted definition of teams could be: ‘a number of living beings who do something together’.
After this brief grammatical diatribe, let us return to the concept of interest: a team in science.
This is a well-established interdisciplinary field, with a robust scientific infrastructure, national committees in the USA that seek consensus-oriented guidelines/outlines, even its own acronym: SciTS, which stands for Science of Team Science.
In a quite interesting volume, the Committee on the Science of Team Science of the National Research Council, USA, provides a brief but consensual definition of SciTS, team science and science teams (2):
- SciTS: a new interdisciplinary field that empirically examines the processes by which large and small scientific teams, research centers, and institutes organize, communicate, and conduct research. It is concerned with understanding and managing circumstances that facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of collaborative research, including translational research. This includes understanding how teams connect and collaborate to achieve scientific breakthroughs that would not be attainable by either individual or simply additive efforts.
- Team science: scientific collaboration, i.e., research conducted by more than one individual in an interdependent fashion, including research conducted by small teams and larger groups.
- Science teams: most team science is conducted by 2 to 10 individuals, and we refer to entities of this size as science teams.
- Larger groups: we refer to over 10 individuals who conduct team science as larger groups. These larger groups are often composed of many smaller science teams, and a few of them include hundreds or even thousands of scientists. Such very large groups typically possess a differentiated division of labor and an integrated structure to coordinate the smaller science teams.
Here, I tried to visualize the composition and potential structural differences between science teams (2–10 individuals) and larger groups (>10 individuals).
[Further sections under development].
References
1. Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge English Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/.
2. National Research Council, Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2015; https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/19007/enhancing-the-effectiveness-of-team-science).
