The structure of informal support in the production of scientific knowledge

The size of collaborative teams in the production of scientific knowledge has been on the rise across a broad range of fields over decades. Despite this transition to big science, recent studies highlight the persisting relevance of smaller collaborative teams for their potential to produce disruptive work. We argue that disruptiveness of small teams is partly explained by the diverse intellectual resources that individual scientists seek from their loose network of informal support to manage resource constraints that small teams face. Using acknowledgement information (i.e., signs of informal support) contained in the articles published in 10 leading sociology journals between 2000 and 2009, we construct a directed network of acknowledgements between scholars and analyze its structure in relation to the coauthorship network constructed from these articles. Results show that scholars who heavily draw upon informal support from their network tend to collaborate in smaller teams. At the network level, the acknowledgement network exhibits a more cohesive structure that can facilitate robust circulation of intellectual resources (e.g., ideas, tools, methods) to a larger portion of scholars in diverse subfields.