Fig. 1, Illustration of (a-b) the freshness of research teams, (c) the disruption of papers and the multidisciplinary impact of papers.

With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71843005 and 71731002), Professor An Zeng, Professor Ying Fan, Professor Zengru Di and Professor Yougui Wang (School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University), in cooperation with Professor Shlomo Havlin from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, revealed the association of fresh teams with original and multidisciplinary research. This work titled “Fresh teams are associated with original and multidisciplinary research” was published online in Nature Human Behaviour on April 5, 2021 (Link: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01084-x). The paper was later publiched by Nature on April 9, 2021 as research highlights entitled “Want fresh results? Analysis of thousands of papers suggests trying new teammates” (Link: http://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00902-6).

Teamwork is a typical characteristic of modern science. To understand in-depth the formation and impact of different research teams, this paper analyzed hundreds of thousands of physical-science articles, as well as large-scale datasets of papers from chemistry, computer science, and multidisciplinary journals. By examining whether any of the researchers in a paper had previously written papers together, this paper developed a method to assess the ‘freshness’ of research teams (see Fig. 1 for illustration).

This paper found that the number of papers published by fully fresh teams are relatively fewer, yet these papers have significantly higher originality and wider impact in multiple research areas. From the theoretical point of view, this work revealed for the first time the “team freshness” as an important factor associated with team creativity, which is meaningful for accelerating knowledge discovery and scientific innovation. Practically, the findings in this paper could provide useful guidance for researchers to establish more efficient collaboration relations, and serve as important references for science and technology policymakers.