The Rise, Impact, and Imbalances of Big Team Psychology

Big team science initiatives represent the largest investments of human capital in science. The present work evaluates the rise, impact, and imbalances of such collaborations in psychology via an analysis of n = 3,031,475 articles published in the 21st century. Results indicate that big teams – ranging from 10 to 100+ authors – are relatively unusual (n = 49,919) but rapidly increasing in popularity. More notably, such collaborations generate unusually high impact, in terms of yearly mentions in scholarly articles (n = 39,803,510), the news (n = 1,018,639), social media (n = 5,971,965), and policy documents (n = 69,959). To date, five countries account for over half of first and non-first author positions – imbalances that are linked to broader economic conditions (GDP and GDP per capita). Summarily, results suggest that big team science is an emerging trend in psychology that is currently inequitably deployed to generate high-impact scientific insights.