Specialisation and experience of research teams: Which matters more for the impact of their publications?
2026-06-29 • Digital Libraries
Digital Libraries
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how choosing research topics affects scientists' work and the progress of science, focusing on teams rather than individuals. They introduced the idea of 'team experience,' which is different from just working on a few special topics. Analyzing about 1 million biomedical papers, they found that both team experience and team specialisation help increase how often papers are cited, but team experience has a stronger effect. Their work suggests that looking at teams and their collective experience is important for understanding scientific impact.
team experienceteam specialisationcitation impactscientific collaborationbiomedical publicationsresearch teamsscientific frontierbibliometricsscientific impact
Authors
Emil Dolmer Alnor
Abstract
Scientists' topic choices strongly influence both individual careers and the advancement of the scientific frontier. While a sizeable body of literature shows that specialisation in a few topics benefits individual careers and fosters impactful research, the role of research teams and their experience have been largely overlooked. This paper introduces experience as a concept distinct from specialisation and shifts the level of analysis from the individual to the research team, reflecting the increasingly team-based nature of science. Using novel publication-level measures of team specialisation and team experience applied to nearly 1 million biomedical publications, the study finds that both are positively associated with citation impact. However, the correlation with citation impact is markedly stronger for team experience than for team specialisation. The study demonstrates how science can be examined at the team level and suggests that future research should pay more attention to studying experience.