Small teams vs. large teams in science

Here we analyse more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954–2014, and demonstrate that across this period smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones.

That is from a new Nature paper by Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James A. Evans.  Here is the NYT write-up by Benedict Carey.