Inverted U-Shaped relationship between team size and citation impact: Mediating role of responsibility diffusion

ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing prominence of research collaboration, a growing number of studies have confirmed that increasing team size can have limited performance benefits. However, the mechanism of this phenomenon has yet to be established. This study, therefore, quantified responsibility diffusion based on author contribution information and explored its mediating role in the relationship between collaboration size and citation impact (citation count in a four-year window). The results show the following: (1) An inverted U-shaped relationship exists between team size and citation count. (2) Responsibility diffusion plays a partial mediating role between team size and citation count. (3) As team size increases, the degree of responsibility diffusion increases. Lastly, (4) responsibility diffusion has an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship with citation count (e.g., a moderate degree of responsibility diffusion has the highest impact). These findings offer a new understanding of the mechanism by which collaboration size influences research performance. This study also has practical implications for solving research collaboration dilemmas based on a group-cognition perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientific collaboration
• team size
• citation impact
• responsibility diffusion
• accountability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I = s*N^t

2. PLOS also has terms that are Research and analysis methods, but were not included in the analysis because it does not have disciplinary properties.

Additional information

Funding

The research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (FSSF-A-230102) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (23BZX111).