How to build up big team science: a practical guide for large-scale collaborations

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. In this paper, we integrate insights from a multi-disciplinary set of BTS initiatives to provide a how-to guide for BTS. We first discuss initial considerations for launching a BTS project, such as building the team, identifying leadership, governance, tools and open science approaches. We then turn to issues related to running and completing a BTS project, such as study design, ethical approvals and issues related to data collection, management and analysis. Finally, we address topics that present special challenges for BTS, including authorship decisions, collaborative writing and team decision-making.

Keywords: big team science; collaboration; meta-science; science of team science.

Figure 1.

Selective BTS initiatives (arranged alphabetically). For each initiative, we approximated the percentage of authors who contributed to each aspect of the project by having two researchers (H.A.B. and N.A.C.) code the author contributions for each paper. For each project, darker shades indicate that a relatively high percentage of authors reported contributing to each aspect of the project. Citations in figure refer to [,–14,22]. Coding information used to generate this figure is available at https://osf.io/2p4ct/.