CORRESPONDENCE

摘要

Your News Feature 'Group theory' (Nature 455,720-723; 2008) highlights the dwindling contribution of single authors in the face of the productive increase in collaboration among scientists. Sociologist Brian Uzzi is not alone in questioning whether a lone researcher can still capture the moment when lightning strikes. Uzzi uses some general metrics to suggest a correlation between the number of citations and the number of authors per paper. But before we rush to embrace these heuristics as a basis for designating best practices for collaboration, our social scientists need a better understanding of how high-impact discoveries in the life sciences come about, for example at different stages of the drug-discovery process.