Many people assume today's easy long-distance collaboration (合作) should release a flood of creative scientific research—but, strangely, a new study suggests the opposite may be true.
Several reasons have been suggested for an apparent slowdown in new research ideas, but it 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 to assess how "disruptive" they were by analyzing quotations. Highly disruptive studies were those that put earlier work to shame and open new avenues of research; articles that quote them usually don't also quote earlier studies they build on. Less disruptive studies build on previous work, and articles quoting them typically also quote prior studies.
The researchers found that as the distance between authors' workplaces increases from zero to at least 600 kilometers, their papers' being disruptive falls by roughly a quarter. To investigate why, Wu and his team analyzed researchers' self-reported roles. They found that those working together in person were more likely to focus on conceptual tasks—the kind of work likely to produce new ideas. Researchers collaborating remotely were more likely to do technical work such as data analysis.
The team also found that when researchers were gathering in person, even big differences between individuals' quotation numbers had little effect on the likelihood of their collaborating on conceptual work. But in remote teams, the chances of researchers jointly producing ideas declined when one had significantly more quotations than the other.
The findings challenge the assumption that merely connecting people online leads to the growth of new ideas. In theory, remote collaboration enables more new combinations of knowledge. However, if new innovation is encouraged, people should be brought together instead of relying on digital infrastructure (基础设施). "
