The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by lengthening their education and training, specializing more narrowly, and working in teams. A widely held view is that by permitting more specialization and increasing combinatorial novelty, the rise of team collaboration will accelerate scientific innovation. Yet, recent work has challenged this view and shown that solo researchers and small teams consistently disrupt science and technology with fresh ideas and opportunities, while larger teams tend to refine existing ones. This paper has been cited by many follow-up studies on knowledge production and collective innovation due to its novelty and significance in correcting the zeitgeist of our time that views collaboration as an inevitable trend. Yet, very few studies re-examine this paper's main finding-the advantage in the inventive capacity of small teams over large teams, using alternative metrics. Against this background, it is essential to further validate this finding through alternative innovation measures, especially given the debates surrounding the nature and validity of the Disruption index, the main metrics the authors used to quantify and compare the inventive capacity of small and large teams. To do so, we measure disruptive innovation with a variable identifying papers that proposed new scientific concepts and patents introducing new technology codes. We confirm that large teams develop and small teams disrupt both science and technology.

翻译：过去半个世纪，科学研究的规模和复杂性急剧增加，研究人员通过延长教育年限、深化专业分工以及组建团队来应对这一变化。一种普遍观点认为，通过允许更细化的专业分工并增加组合新颖性，团队协作的兴起将加速科学创新。然而，近期研究对此提出质疑，表明独立研究者和小型团队始终以新颖思路和机遇颠覆科学和技术，而大型团队则更倾向于完善现有成果。该论文因其在纠正“协作是必然趋势”这一时代偏见方面的新颖性和重要性，被众多关于知识生产与集体创新的后续研究引用。然而，鲜有研究采用替代指标重新审视该论文的核心发现——即小型团队在创新能力上优于大型团队。在此背景下，尤其是考虑到作者用于量化比较大小团队创新能力的核心指标“颠覆性指数”在本质与有效性方面存在争议，通过替代创新测度进一步验证该发现至关重要。为此，我们采用识别提出新科学概念的论文和引入新技术代码的专利变量来衡量颠覆性创新，证实了大型团队致力于完善、小型团队则倾向于颠覆科学和技术这一结论。