It's a real pleasure to read a literature review conducted by professionals. The structure of science is changing, become more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, more international, and more focused around Big Science projects like CERN. Has our understanding of how science is done, and how future scientists should be trained, kept pace with changes in practice?

The results in this report are both comprehensive and sadly partial. The report has a profound ambition to discover the factors that lead to success in team science projects, from personality types, to management styles, educational experiences, and institutional structures and assessments. There is a strong recommendation that something be done to formally assess how science teams are working together to produce knowledge, but little concrete about how to overcome deep and very real epistemic and cultural challenges to success, or what competencies are needed in the future.

Good teams have mental models of whatever one else knows and is doing, so that they can successful guide research from the bottom up. But cross-training is expensive in terms of time and energy. "Great" scientists appear on psychological tests as arrogant extroverts, but great leaders are inspiring, empathetic, and humble. Demographic diversity is sought out in grant apps, and has a negative effect on team performance. The individualistic promotion system for scientists, based around universities and disciplines, mitigates against teamwork and interdisciplinary science, even as funding for those priorities has gone up.

The summary of this book in one line might be "treat your research staff like human beings," and hope things work out. The science of team science future agenda seems to be based on very close tracking of researchers through specialized badges to collect more precise data about what is being done, and the development of models and simulations. I'm sympathetic, but I wonder what this gets you that detailed ethnography, or even an honest airing of grievances about the direction of a research collaboration and the balance of power within it, do not.

For all that, this is a very well researched primer, and I'm looking forward to diving into the footnotes over the next little bit.