Scientific teams who collaborate remotely are less likely to produce breakthrough discoveries than those who work together at the same site, a new study has found.
The power of digital communication to connect researchers from across the world – often in real time thanks to video-conferencing platforms – has long been viewed as an important way to accelerate scientific discovery. But a new paper published in Nature suggests that work by geographically distanced researchers is less likely to lead to influential and disruptive findings.
The paper, by researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Pittsburgh, helps to shed “new light on one of the great puzzles of our time: why the connectivity brought by the internet has not led to the upsurge in innovation that recombinant theory predicts”, it says.
“Our key finding is that, although remote collaboration permits more new combinations of knowledge in principle, it also makes it harder for teams to integrate the pieces,” it adds.
