The Strength in Numbers

Focusing on the nascent science of team science,The Strength in Numbers synthesizes the results of the most far-reaching study to date on collaboration among university scientists to provide answers to such questions. Drawing on a national survey with responses from researchers at more than one hundred universities, anonymous web posts, archival data, and extensive interviews with active scientists and engineers in over a dozen STEM disciplines, Barry Bozeman and Jan Youtie set out a framework to characterize different types of collaboration and their likely outcomes. They also develop a model to define research effectiveness, which assesses factors internal and external to collaborations. They advance what they have found to be the gold standard of science collaborations: consultative collaboration management. This strategy--which codifies methods of consulting all team members on a study's key points and incorporates their preferences and values--empowers managers of STEM collaborations to optimize the likelihood of their effectiveness.