Understanding the Significance of Mid-Tier Research Teams in Idea Flow Through a Community

Studying the dynamics of research communities has been an important yet tedious topic. It is important for devising management policies that optimize the quality of research outputs by promoting a certain composition, structure, and interaction patterns for a community. While there has been significant attention to understanding the roles of individuals, there has been less focus on studying the roles that research groups perform and how roles relate to the characteristics of the community. This article presents an experimental study on the roles that research groups have in the idea flow through a community. The study analyzes two facets: the contribution of different kinds of groups to the impact research ideas make on other groups and the importance of specific groups to connect a community together. The results showed that research groups can be classified into four categories depending on the number of received citations. Groups of the mid-tier categories (called categories B and C in this article) are important in tying a community together as they improve the idea impact and bridging between groups. Policies that aggressively eliminate such groups reduce the effectiveness of idea flow, even though research communities include a certain amount of robustness for moderate levels of group removals.