Size of science team at university and internal co-publications: science policy implications

Scientific collaboration within a science team (unit, group, etc.) has been under scrutiny. Recently, science of team science has emerged to use science for deep understanding of the ways researchers jointly perform science to increase their team’s performance. This article analyses internal scientific outputs with respect to the size of university’s science team. The objective is to examine the science policy motive that is, if the team size increases, by encouraging academics to gather in larger teams, then their outputs increase. The method of the contrapositive of this conditional statement is adopted. Thus, 120 accredited teams, composed of about 1500 academics in four universities in Morocco, were analyzed using a cross-matrix of members’ co-publications, an intra-collaboration index, Lorenz curve of both internal co-publications and sole-publications, with respect to team’s size. Our findings show that internal co-publications and sole ones are higher for small size teams and that the Lorenz distributions of these two indicators are unequal in favor of small size teams. We discuss the implications of our findings for science policy, beyond size, such as the output- instead of input-based perspective to form a team, time requirement to build a collaborative team, inter- and intra-disciplinarity oriented research, team directorship, etc.