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Published online 8 October 2008 | Nature 455, 720-723 (2008) | doi:10.1038/455720a
News Feature
Collaboration: Group theory
What makes a successful team? John Whitfield looks at research that uses massive online databases and network analysis to come up with some rules of thumb for productive collaborations.
Flip through any recent issue of Nature, including this one, and the story is there in black and white: almost all original research papers have multiple authors. So far this year, in fact, Nature has published only six single-author papers, out of a total of some 700 reports.
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The quality of science is inversely proportional to the number of co-authors. As Michael Crichton said in The Caltech Michelin Lecture on January 17, 2003: "Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." That sums up my opinion of the value of most large research collaborations. With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel, http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Larger research groups are more vulnerable to manipulation to get the "right" answer. For example 178 scientists co-authored a paper reporting the "discovery" that solar neutrinos oscillate at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (although they do not), hundreds of climatologists agreed that anthropologic CO2 causes global warming (although solar forcing is the dominate cause of climate change), and there is little doubt that evidence of the "God particle" (the Higgs boson) will be found by the thousands of physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider. With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel, http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Former U. S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his Farewell Address to the Nation (17 January 1961): "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded." [ http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm ] Thus, the reports of "oscillating" solar neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and "God particles" at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN will be as factually correct as the Nobel Prize winning work of Al Gore and the IPCC in "conclusively" showing that man-made CO2 caused global climate change. Oliver K. Manuel, http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
One thing that interested me in this story was how the results might apply to other types of groups. The story mentions both scientists and also, tangentially, broadway shows. I work in biology education and so specifically started thinking about biology classes. In labs, especially, students are always put in groups, usually in pairs but sometimes in other sized groups. In the average class, the lab groups don't change through the semester. It seems like some of the ideas in this article might apply to group learning as well. I put some further musings on that topic on my blog at <a href="http://simbio.com/content/group-theory">SimBiotic Software</a>. I'm pretty sure there is some research on educational group size, but does anyone have specific references that would apply this kind of thinking to education?
For additional information on this topic, see Correspondence entitled, "Key discoveries often originate with lone researchers" by Shawn J. Green & Jon Brendsel [Nature 456, 315 (20 November 2008); doi:10.1038/456315a; Published online 19 November 2008] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7220/full/456315a.html With kind regards, Oliver K. Manuel http://www.omatumr@yahoo.com; http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09