The Rise, Impact, and Imbalances of Big-Team Psychology

Abstract

The present work evaluates the rise, impact, and imbalances of big-team psychology via an analysis of 3,023,895 articles published in the 21st century. Results indicate that big teams—ranging from 10 to more than 100 authors—are relatively unusual ( n = 49,695) but increasing in popularity. More notably, such collaborations generate unusually high impact in terms of yearly mentions in scholarly articles ( n = 39,788,158), the news ( n = 1,018,639), social media ( n = 5,971,965), and policy documents ( n = 69,959). An examination of country-level sociocultural indicators revealed that first authors, in general, tend to be in regions that are relatively WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. However, this imbalance is slightly more pronounced among larger teams. In summary, results suggest that big-team science is an emerging trend in psychology—one that is unevenly deployed across world regions to generate high-impact scientific insights.