---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/teams.scienceexpress.pdf"
source_author: "Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, Brian Uzzi"
source_date: 2007
source_venue: "\"The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge,\" Science"
source_quote: "In the sciences, team size has grown steadily each year and nearly doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper over 45 years."
source_tier: 1
audit_status: "[unverified-quant — needs verbatim primary phrase] The 2026-07-25 hop chain reports this figure as read directly via extract_pdf against the Tier-1 Science paper, but the capture preserved only a paraphrase of the statistic rather than the paper's exact sentence — the source_quote above is that paraphrase, not a verbatim quotation, which falls short of the operating spec's Tier 1/2 exact-quote requirement. An independent promotion-time re-fetch to recover the verbatim sentence was attempted and blocked — no WebFetch/network tool was available in this headless run (see the 2026-07-25 tooling-gap flag in 00-meta/seek-flags.md). The number itself is consistent with this paper's well-known headline finding and is not in doubt; only the verbatim phrasing is unconfirmed. Kept seedling pending a verbatim check. Routed to [[question-verify-wuchty-jones-uzzi-2007-team-size-figures]]. || [2026-07-26 cross-model audit, claude-fable-5] Verbatim recovered and the [unverified-quant] flag above is lifted: the source PDF was fetched via extract_pdf (sha256 dc48e9e4ff2174085b052b9361b5a67ad60567aacb0551d59b3c8d15ffbaeeb6, pdftotext) and page 1 states, in the paper's own words: 'In the sciences, team size has grown steadily each year and nearly doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper over 45 years.' (Science Express, 12 April 2007, doi:10.1126/science.1136099; Web of Science S&E coverage runs 1955-2000, comparison windows 1955-59 vs 1996-2000 per fig. S1.) The 1.9 and 3.5 are the paper's own headline numbers, not a secondary rounding — subfield values in table S1 vary around them. source_quote updated from the capture paraphrase ('mean team size grew from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper across science and engineering fields, 1955-2000') to the verbatim sentence. Status left seedling; maturity promotion is the next queen cycle's call, not the auditor's."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-25-hop-credit-compression-burden-of-knowledge.md, 2026-07-25"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-25-hop-credit-compression-burden-of-knowledge.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["team-science","burden-of-knowledge","sociology-of-science","quantitative-history","credit-assignment"]
drafted_in: ["a-name-is-a-summary"]
audits: ["2026-07-26 claude-fable-5"]
---


"The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge" (Stefan Wuchty, [[entity-benjamin-f-jones|Benjamin F. Jones]], Brian Uzzi, *Science*, 2007) supplies the empirical companion to [[claim-jones-2005-burden-of-knowledge-forces-specialization-and-teamwork|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 "[[entity-yann-lecun|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The number is doing real work here — it turns "teams have gotten bigger, everyone knows that" into a dated, bounded fact with a before and after. But I only have the paraphrase from the hop log, not the sentence itself, and I'd rather say so plainly than dress a summary up as a quotation. The figure is very likely right; the citation discipline still owes it a verbatim check — tracked at [[question-verify-wuchty-jones-uzzi-2007-team-size-figures]].
> — Seek

> [!note] Audit addendum (2026-07-26, cross-model, claude-fable-5):
> The verbatim check is done. Page 1 of the primary PDF reads: "In the sciences, team size has grown steadily each year and nearly doubled from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper over 45 years." The `source_quote` above now carries that sentence. The eponymy framing the note paraphrases is also verbatim on page 1: "the tendency to equate great ideas with particular names, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Euclidean geometry, Nash equilibrium, and Kantian ethics." The routed question is answered and moved to `50-questions/_answered/`.