Despite team-based works having been dominant in scientific production, little is known about the relationships between team size and research performance in cross-domain research contexts. Drawn from a collaboration network of 114,577 scholars, we first investigate the relationships between team size and both research productivity and impact. In the first-degree network (i.e., a network that consists of the focal author, the coauthors, and the connections among the nodes), productivity is positively associated with team size, while team size and research impact exhibit an inverted-U shaped relationship. In the second-degree network (i.e., a network that consists of the focal author, the coauthors, the coauthors’ coauthors, and the connections among the nodes), both research productivity and impact suggest an inverted-U shaped relationship with the team size of second-degree connections. We also find that research variety exerts a moderating effect on the relationships between team size and research performance. With the increase in research variety, the curvilinear relationship between first-degree team size and research productivity steepens, whereas the inverted-U shaped relationship between first-degree team size and research impact first flattens and then displays a U-shaped relationship. In the second-degree network, team size exerts little influence on research productivity when research variety is extremely small, and such an effect becomes inverted-U shaped when research variety increases. The turning point for the inverted-U shaped relationship between second-degree team size and research impact continues to shift to the left and down as research variety increases.

尽管基于团队的工作在科学生产中占主导地位，但在跨领域研究背景下，团队规模与研究绩效之间的关系知之甚少。我们从 114,577 名学者的合作网络中抽取，首先调查团队规模与研究生产力和影响之间的关系。在一级网络（即由焦点作者、共同作者和节点之间的连接组成的网络）中，生产力与团队规模呈正相关，而团队规模和研究影响呈倒U形关系. 在二级网络（即由焦点作者、共同作者、共同作者的共同作者和节点之间的连接组成的网络）中，研究生产力和影响力都表明与二级联系的团队规模呈倒 U 形关系。我们还发现研究多样性对团队规模和研究绩效之间的关系有调节作用。随着研究多样性的增加，一级团队规模与研究生产力之间的曲线关系变得陡峭，而一级团队规模与研究影响之间的倒U型关系先变平，然后呈U型关系。在二级网络中，当研究多样性极小时，团队规模对研究生产力的影响很小，而随着研究多样性的增加，这种影响呈倒U形。