Collaborating in Person May Spark More Innovative Research
Bringing people together virtually doesn’t seem to boost disruptive research
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Many people assume today’s easy long-distance collaboration should release an unprecedented flood of innovative scientific research—but, oddly, a new study suggests the opposite may be true.
Several reasons have been suggested for an apparent slowdown in bold new research ideas, but it now seems remote collaboration itself may be a limiting factor. For a recent study in Nature, University of Pittsburgh social scientist Lingfei Wu and his colleagues found that teams collaborating remotely produce fewer breakthroughs.
The researchers analyzed 20 million research papers published between 1960 and 2020 and four million patents filed between 1976 and 2020. They assessed how “disruptive” these were by analyzing citations and scoring each from –1 to 1, where 1 means highly disruptive. Highly disruptive studies were defined as those that eclipse earlier work and open new avenues of research; articles that cite them usually don’t also cite earlier studies they build on. Less disruptive studies incrementally build on previous work, and articles citing them typically also cite preceding studies.
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The researchers found that as the distance between authors’ workplaces increases from zero to at least 600 kilometers, their papers’ probability of being disruptive (having a score above 0) falls by roughly a quarter. This relation holds across varying team sizes, time periods and fields.
To investigate why, Wu and his team analyzed researchers’ self-reported roles. They found that those working together in person were…
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