Nature. In a experiment, I don't know yet. Why is Blight so far? Like, it sounds so simple.

They had no idea. But now the data's... I find this not only refreshing, but at some level, astounding.

Nature.

Welcome back to the Nature podcast.

This week we'll be hearing how team size might affect research innovation

and learning about the links between poor quality sleep and aphorosclerosis.

I'm Nick Howe.

And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

Okay. an aphorosglerosis. I'm Nick Hal. And I'm Benjamin Thompson. Now, Nick, you've just joined the team, as we discussed last week, and I'm sure you'll have noticed

there's not that many of us.

Agreed. We're a small group.

Nimble, I'd say, and talented. Modest too. Well, quite. And team size, albeit in a research science context,

is something you've been looking into this week. That's right, Ben. Scientific research today

seemed more complicated than ever. There's simply too much out there for one person to be an

expert on everything. This may be one of the reasons why research teams are getting bigger and bigger.

And big teams can bring benefits. For example, there's a strong positive correlation between the

numbers of authors on the paper and the number

of citations it receives. But are there any advantages of working in a smaller research group?

Are we losing something by focusing on bigger teams? A paper coming out in nature this week

has been looking at how the size of teams in all areas of science and technology

affects their outputs. I spoke to the corresponding author of this paper, James Evans

from the University of Chicago, who's been crunching the numbers. So we looked at 65 million

...