Small-team science appears to be losing ground in the Nature Index, where the share of papers written by just one or two authors is falling quickly. At the same time, research produced by larger groups is continuing to grow, adding to a long-running shift in how scientific work is organized.
The trend fits a broader pattern: scientific teams have been getting bigger over time. The latest figures highlighted by Nature suggest that solo research and two-author collaborations now make up a smaller slice of published output than they once did, while multi-author studies are becoming more common.
That change is striking because some of the most influential papers in scientific history came from very small teams. Nature points to the famous 1953 paper by James Watson and Francis Crick as an example of how a two-author study could reshape an entire field. The new data suggests that this style of authorship is becoming less typical in today’s research landscape.
The findings do not mean small teams no longer matter, but they do show that the balance is shifting toward larger collaborations. In the Nature Index, the momentum is clearly with big-team science, raising questions about what that means for independent and small-group discovery in the years ahead.
