Flat teams drive scientific innovation.

With teams growing in all areas of scientiic and scholarly research, we explore the relationship between team structure and the character of knowledge they produce. Drawing on 89,575 self-reports of team member research activity underlying scientiic publications, we show how individual activities cohere into broad roles of 1) leadership through the direction and presentation of research and 2) support through data collection, analysis, and discussion.he hidden hierarchy of a scientiic team is characterized by its lead (or L) ratio of members playing leadership roles to total team size.he L ratio is validated through correlation with imputed contributions to the speciic paper and to science as a whole, which we use to efectively extrapolate the L ratio for 16,397,750 papers where roles are not explicit. We ind that, relative to lat, egalitarian teams, tall, hierarchical teams produce less novelty and more often develop existing ideas, increase productivity for those on top and decrease it for those beneath, and increase shortterm citations but decrease long-term inluence.hese efects hold within person--the same person on the same-sized team produces science much more likely to disruptively innovate if they work on a lat, high-L-ratio team.hese results suggest the critical role lat teams play for sustainable scientiic advance and the training and advancement of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]