  Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent
finding shows that teams with both large and small sizes are essential in
research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country's scientific
work is carried out by big/small teams. Here, using over 26 million
publications from Web of Science, we find that China's research output is more
dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the
case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers
are done by big teams, China's drop in small team output is much steeper. As
teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is
essential for innovative works does not increase as much as that in other
countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small team
works than the National Science Foundation of U.S. (NSF) does, implying that
big teams are more preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides
new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which
urges a need to balance small and big teams.
