Diversity within research teams studying allergic diseases can increase research output

Research on allergic diseases requires knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines including, but not limited to, microbiology, genetics, botany, environmental sciences and data sciences. The disease’s pathology may involve many different areas within the body. The critical allergens can range from airborne plant matter, insects, molds, manufactured materials, food or even elements of one’s own body. Given this complexity, ensuring a diversity of different disciplines within a research team should increase the team’s research output.

If this is true, it would have important implications for how research teams are organized. Japanese researchers have been studying research teams in the US, UK and Japan to see if disciplinary diversity in a research team increases research output. In fact, they found a positive correlation between the two. Takeya Adachi, first author on the paper and an assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology, Keio University School of Medicine highlighted the importance of this question, saying “by analyzing how diverse teams perform, we can optimize research strategies to promote innovation and impactful discoveries.”

The paper was published online in the World Allergy Organization Journal at 12 December.

 “Disciplinary diversity enhances research teams in three key ways: (1) It boosts creativity and innovation by incorporating a variety of perspectives and expertise, which enriches the quality of research. (2) It expands the reach of research, enabling it to address broader unmet medical needs, especially in fields like medicine (research quantity), and (3) It increases the long-term impact of research by contributing to a broader range of scientific advancements (research substantiality). Together, these factors demonstrate how diversity drives meaningful and sustainable progress,” said Norika Narimatsu, co-first author and researcher from the Department of Computer Science, Leiden University, Netherlands.

They looked at research that was funded through three agencies, the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the United States, the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the United Kingdom, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). They analyzed over six thousand papers in allergy and immunology research from each agency, specifically looking for any statistical relationship between the diversity of the research team and the final research output for that team. 

To measure the academic disciplinary diversity of a team, they collected information on the research history of each researcher within a team and used the All Science Journal Classification codes (ASJC), which assign subject area classifications to all research papers based on their title and content, to determine research domains. While diversity was primarily assessed using the number of distinct research domains (ASJC codes), the team also incorporated more nuanced metrics, such as the newly developed Omnidisciplinary Index (o-index). The o-index evaluates the individual contributions and disparities within a team, allowing for a deeper understanding of team composition beyond simple counts of research domains. The research domains were then analyzed against several measures of research output, including number of papers published by the team after the teams had formed, and research excellence, which was measured using citation numbers to determine the ranking of the top 10% and top 1% of papers in their fields.

The diversity indices for the research teams were similar for all three funding agencies and results did show that team diversity had positive impacts on research. Interestingly, for the NIH and MRC agencies, increased diversity in team members was positively associated with increased research output, however, the JSPS showed a stronger positive relationship between degree of specialization and research output.

Overall diversity does appear to have a positive impact on increasing research output but indications in the JSPS results led the authors to conclude that depth of expertise can be more important in some cases, rather than simply increasing the mix of disciplines to reach a certain level of heterogeneity.

“This highlights that understanding the dynamics of team diversity requires a nuanced approach, emphasizing the need to analyze not just the breadth of expertise but also the depth and balance within the team,” said Adachi.

Looking to the future, “we hope to identify the optimal team compositions and funding strategies tailored to the unique requirements of each field or project. Ultimately, our goal is to establish a clearer understanding of how to design research teams and allocate funding to maximize innovation and impact across diverse scientific domains,” said Narimatsu.