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Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Few papers in history have had the disruptive impact of James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 Nature paper proposing the double-helix structure of DNA1. It’s a classic of small-team science; two authors proposing a paradigm-shifting idea that research teams around the world build on for years to come. But a new analysis of authorship data that has been captured by the Nature Index over the past decade shows that small-team science is in decline. In some research fields — especially the biological and health sciences, in which Watson and Crick made their impact — solo- and dual-authored papers are increasingly rare. Across the natural sciences, the proportion of papers in the index with one or two authors declined from 10.8% to 7.1% between 2015 and 2024. Over the same period, big-team science grew rapidly, with the greatest publication growth seen in papers with 11 to 50 authors. Overall, publications in the index with between 3 and 50 authors rose from 88.5% to 92.2%. Although the Nature Index tracks only a subset of high-quality journals, the findings are consistent with previous studies showing a long-term increase in team size across science (see ‘Middle ground’). At the beginning of the last century, for instance, most papers were written by one or two scientists2. Since the mid-twentieth century, the average size of research teams has grown steadily across most scientific disciplines3. According to Lingfei Wu, an information scientist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who studies the effect of factors such as team size on scientific innovation, “The decline in one- and two-author papers is one of the most stable patterns in science.” Team dynamics Among the natural-sciences subjects in the Nature Index, biological sciences had the lowest proportion of small-team papers in 2024. One- and two-author publications slipped from 6.1% to 3.8% of biological-science papers between 2015 and 2024, whereas 3–50 author papers rose from 93.3% to 95.3%. Chemistry had the second-lowest proportion of small-team papers in 2024, at 4.7% of total chemistry papers, down from 8.2% in 2015. In the health sciences, which have been included in the Nature Index since 2022, one- and two-author papers have flatlined at a rate of 1%. The physical sciences is the only subject to have its small-team papers increase in absolute terms (by just over 300 in the 2015–24 period). However, they still dropped as a proportion of total physical-sciences papers (14.9% to 9.6%). This could reflect a trend in which small-team papers remain important to the subject, but large-team papers are growing at a much faster rate. The trend in physical sciences could reflect a broader pattern playing out in the index data: even though small-team science remains productive and, in some areas, has grown slightly in absolute terms, it is being dwarfed by the rapid expansion of research conducted by larger collaborations. As a result, small teams are making up a shrinking share of scientific output — not because they are disappearing, but because large, multi-author projects are becoming increasingly common and prolific (see ‘Team size by subject’). Global shift The move away from small-team science probably stems from long-term changes in how research is organized and conducted around the world, according to Wu. “After the Second World War, in the United States and then elsewhere, centralized funding agencies were established,” he says. “Forming research teams with combined expertise is a relatively easy way to argue for financial support.” Today, funding systems often explicitly favour bigger teams, says Chaoqun Ni, a metascience researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “In the United States, National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants encourage interdisciplinary multicentre teams.” European Union grants also often stipulate cross-border collaboration, says Mike Thelwall, a data-science researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK. In the index analysis, the declining proportion of one- and two-author papers is seen in most research-leading countries. In the United States, these papers fell from 9.8% of the national total in 2015 to 6% in 2024. Germany, the United Kingdom and South Korea saw similar declines, with one- and two-author papers dropping from around 7% to around 4% of their research output over the same period. China’s one- and two-author papers dropped from 3.5% of its total output in 2015 to 2.4% in 2024. Japan follows a different pattern. There, the share of one- and two-author papers remained stable at just under 8% throughout the 10-year period, and papers with 3–50 authors declined slightly, from 89.1% to 88.5% of the country's total research output. It is difficult to extrapolate these data to make conclusions about wider research-publishing trends in specific countries. However, according to information-systems researcher Yukie Sano at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, funding pressures and cultural factors have probably slowed down the shift towards larger, especially international, research teams in the country. Compared with scientists in other countries, “Japanese researchers tend to have comparatively few international collaborators,” she says. Sano attributes this in part to the weak yen, which has made overseas travel more expensive, and funding reforms that have shifted support from stable institutional funding towards competitive grants. The result is a heavier administrative burden that leaves researchers with less time to build international networks. “Because I have had to spend more time writing funding proposals, my time for research has shrunk,” says Sano, who recently skipped an international conference because of her workload. “I feel isolated from other countries because of the difficult situation in Japanese universities.” Although similar pressures affect researchers in other countries, the confluence of cultural and financial factors might explain Japan’s relative stability of science-team size in the analysis, says Sano. Specialized science The complexity of modern science is another key factor in the decline of small-team science. Scientists are increasingly reliant on large, expensive, shared infrastructure, such as supercomputers, which necessitates large collaborations, says Ni. Diverse expertise is also required in many research projects. “Science is becoming much more specialized and so, in many fields, a good paper now requires expertise from many individuals,” says Ni. For example, a biomedical study might need the input of laboratory scientists, clinicians, data analysts and statisticians. Enjoying our latest content? Log in or create an account to continue Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research Nature Index’s news and supplement content is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature. For more information about Nature Index, see the homepage. References Watson, J. D. & Crick, F. H. C. Nature171, 737–738 (1953).