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. 2022 Nov 29;17(11):e0278043.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278043. eCollection 2022.

Interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse science teams can produce significant outcomes

Alison Specht  1 , Kevin Crowston  2
Affiliations

Interdisciplinary collaboration from diverse science teams can produce significant outcomes

Alison Specht et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Scientific teams are increasingly diverse in discipline, international scope and demographics. Diversity has been found to be a driver of innovation but also can be a source of interpersonal friction. Drawing on a mixed-method study of 22 scientific working groups, this paper presents evidence that team diversity has a positive impact on scientific output (i.e., the number of journal papers and citations) through the mediation of the interdisciplinarity of the collaborative process, as evidenced by publishing in and citing more diverse sources. Ironically these factors also seem to be related to lower team member satisfaction and perceived effectiveness, countered by the gender balance of the team. Qualitative data suggests additional factors that facilitate collaboration, such as trust and leadership. Our findings have implications for team design and management, as team diversity seems beneficial, but the process of integration can be difficult and needs management to lead to a productive and innovative process.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Research model.
Inputs, mediators (process and emergent states) and outputs. Hypothesis numbers are shown.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Working group workflow.
A depiction of the way the working groups work together in our scenarios, where groups of diverse people meet together intermittently over a period of time in a supported environment to examine difficult, multi-disciplinary, problems. The meetings might each last up to a week, and are often at six month to yearly intervals.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Influences on citations received.
The median number of citations received by a group’s publications against (a) publication discipline and (b) the diversity of publications cited. One group is an outlier to the plot in 4(a) and is not visible in the plot. The 95% confidence envelope around the trend is shown. ‘0’ on the axes is the grand mean for all groups for that variable, and the intervals shown are one standard deviation from the mean. The data points show the partial residuals for the groups, i.e., the residual after controlling for the other variables in the regression.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Model output.
Graphical summary of the quantitative results. *specifically median citations received by each article.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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