Outstanding Scientific Knowledge: How Status and Cohesion Shapes Scientists’ Collaboration Networks and their Performance

We review the literature showing that outstanding scientific, patenting, and artistic work is increasingly the domain of teams, not individuals. We then examine how the global network structure of a field within which teams of collaborators are embedded influences their success, highlighting the importance of small world networks. Finally, we model how rules for choosing collaborators based on their status or cohesiveness can lead to global networks that appear to enhance or deplete the performance of the teams embedded within them. Our analyses use a range of databases from entire Web of Science database, 1955-2005, to data derived from an agent based model.