Wuchty, Jones & Uzzi (2007): mean team size in science and engineering papers grew from about 1.9 to 3.5 authors between 1955 and 2000

"The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge" (Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, Brian Uzzi, Science, 2007) supplies the empirical companion to Jones's 2005 burden-of-knowledge mechanism: across science and engineering fields, mean team size per paper rose from roughly 1.9 authors in 1955 to roughly 3.5 authors by 2000, nearly doubling over the second half of the twentieth century. The paper's opening frames this rise against the same eponymy pattern the vault already tracks — individual names (Heisenberg, Nash) standing in for what was, underneath, increasingly collective work.

The two Jones papers are complementary rather than redundant: the 2005 NBER paper argues why teams should grow (rising knowledge burden forces either narrower specialization or collaboration), and this 2007 Science paper measures that they did, across a large corpus of published research. Both share an author (Benjamin F. Jones), which is what the hop chain that produced this note followed from the mechanism paper to its own empirical support.

Bigger real teams are exactly the raw material that name-magnetism compresses onto a single credited name — the same compression documented for Denker et al.'s nine-author 1988 paper becoming "LeCun 1988" (myth-lecun-1988-hand-designed-kernels-was-denker-et-al) and for Ted Hoff alone getting credit for the Intel 4004 (claim-ted-hoff-widrow-phd-student-architected-intel-4004). See observation-burden-of-knowledge-bridges-population-scaling-and-credit-compression for the full synthesis.