2025/07/16 by Hanjo D. Boekhout, Eelke M. Heemskerk, Boekhout, Hanjo D. +5
Engineering · #Biomedical and Engineering Education #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.12255
openalex publication_date 2025/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study the success of persistent teams. Challenging the idea that persistence alone drives success, we find that team freshness - new collaborations built on prior experience - is key to success. High impact research tends to emerge early in a team's lifespan. Analyzing complex team overlap, we find that teams open to new collaborative ties consistently produce better science. Specifically, team re-combinations that introduce new freshness impulses sustain success, while persistence impulses from experienced teams are linked to earlier impact. Together, freshness and persistence shape team success across collaboration stages.