High Cost and Pace Driving Collaborative Science

High Cost and Pace Drive Collaborative Science

Science, once siloed and hyper-competitive, is becoming increasingly collaborative in the face of the high cost of research and the need for speed in discovery.

A significant rise in the number of multi-author/multi-institution papers—as well as the dawn of open/shared data to hasten the pace of innovation—is creating promising opportunities for collaboration and changing the face of “Big Science.”

Data comes from:

Web of Knowledge, a Thomson Reuters research platform for the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities

Expert Insights

An Academic Viewpoint

Professor Blaise Cronin,
PhD, DSSc, DLitt(Hon)

Indiana University Bloomington
Editor-in-Chief, JASIST

“Such is the complexity, scale, capital intensity and competitiveness of contemporary science, that collaboration, both formal and informal, has become the defining modus operandi. Science is increasingly a team-based enterprise, as evidenced by the phenomenon of hyperauthorship: scholarly papers routinely have dozens, scores, hundreds, sometimes thousands of co-authors, often drawn from different disciplines and countries. In many fields, co-authorship is the norm; sole authorship an anachronism. The lone scientist may soon be an endangered species.”

The Science Watcher

Christopher King

ScienceWatch content manager, editor

“Fortunately, our ScienceWatch inquiry coincided with the successful search for the Higgs boson (or particle)—one of the more noteworthy scientific achievements of recent years. Given the enormous scale and expense of the technology involved in the Higgs hunt, it’s easy to see why collaboration occurred among dozens of nations and thousands of scientists. And although the multi-author phenomenon is especially pronounced in high-energy physics, it also seems to reflect research in general these days: increasingly collaborative, and increasingly international.”

Change Into Opportunity