Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science

This paper demonstrates that teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries, a dramatic shift in knowledge production that generalizes across virtually all fields of science, engineering, and social science. Moreover, elite universities play a dominant role in this shift. By examining 4.2 million papers published over three decades, we found that multi- university collaborations (i) are the fastest growing type of authorship structure, (ii) produce the highest- impact papers when they include a top-tier university, and ( iii) are increasingly stratified by in- group university rank. Despite the rising frequency of research that crosses university boundaries, the intensification of social stratification in multi- university collaborations suggests a concentration of the production of scientific knowledge in fewer rather than more centers of high- impact science.