Meta-analysis

The Science of Team Science: A Meta-analysis of an Emerging Scientific Field

This study is currently under review at Scientometrics

Overview

Our study analyzes the development of the Science of Team Science (SciTS), a growing field focused on understanding and improving scientific collaboration. Although SciTS has expanded over the past two decades, the field still lacks a clear understanding of who produces SciTS knowledge, what kinds of research and methods dominate the field, and how robust its empirical and theoretical foundations are. To address these gaps, we conducted a meta-analysis of 117 empirically based SciTS articles published between 2006 and 2025, asking: (1) Who conducts SciTS research? and (2) What are the key features of SciTS research production, including its topics, methods, theories, and publication patterns?

Findings

We find that SciTS is heavily shaped by its origins in U.S. biomedical and health research. Most first authors are based in the United States, with limited representation from the Global South, and most are not social scientists despite the field’s focus on the social dynamics of collaboration. SciTS research is also concentrated in biomedical and health contexts, scattered across many journals, and rarely published in traditional science studies venues. The literature most often focuses on performance, productivity, communication, diversity, leadership, authorship, and culture, while topics such as power, ethics, mentorship, emotions, knowledge co-creation, accessibility, and intersectionality remain under-studied. Methodologically, the field relies more heavily on quantitative approaches, uses qualitative methods unevenly, and often studies individuals, publications, or other proxies rather than in vivo scientific teams. We also found that much of SciTS research is atheoretical, conceptually underspecified, and inconsistent in how it defines “team science.”

Our Recommendations

We recommend strengthening SciTS by making it more empirically comprehensive, methodologically rich, and theoretically integrated. This includes expanding SciTS research beyond U.S. biomedical contexts; increasing attention to power, cultural context, and team-level outcomes; using richer qualitative and mixed methods such as interviews, ethnography, participant observation, and focus groups; and studying teams directly as they collaborate rather than relying primarily on individual-level data or bibliometric proxies.

We also call for greater institutionalization of SciTS through dedicated journals, training pathways, research centers, professional roles, and funding streams, as well as deeper integration with sociology of science, anthropology of science, philosophy and history of science, and science and technology studies. Together, these recommendations aim to support a more coherent and mature SciTS capable of advancing understanding of scientific collaboration across disciplines.