Team formation and team impact: The balance between team freshness and repeat collaboration

Incorporating fresh members into teams is considered a pathway to team creativity. However, whether freshness improves team performance or not remains unclear, as well as the optimal involvement of fresh members for team performance. Focusing on team impact, one important dimension of team performance, this study uses a group of authors on the byline of a publication as a proxy for a scientific team and quantifies team impact by citations of a paper authored by this team, i.e., article team impact. We extend an indicator, i.e., article team freshness, to measure the extent to which a scientific team incorporates new members, by calculating the fraction of new collaboration relations established within the team. Based on more than 43 million scientific publications covering more than a half-century of research from Microsoft Academic Graph, this study provides a holistic picture of the current development of article team freshness by outlining the temporal evolution of freshness, and its disciplinary distribution. Subsequently, using a multivariable regression approach, we examine the association between article team freshness and papers’ short-term and long-term citations. The major findings are as follows: (1) article team freshness in scientific teams has been increasing in the past half-century; (2) there exists an inverted-U-shaped association between article team freshness and papers’ citations in all the disciplines and different periods; (3) article team impact is hampered by article team freshness in small-sized teams, while medium-sized and large-sized teams can benefit more from article team freshness before the fraction of new collaboration reaches its turning point. The findings of this study provide implications for the practice of team formation and team management in science.