Team science is a mode of research organized around a formal, often cross-disciplinary team rather than a single investigator directing subordinate staff. The team typically spans multiple departments, institutions, or fields entirely, with shared leadership and a defined governance structure rather than one principal investigator (PI) holding sole scientific and administrative authority. It’s distinct from ordinary co-authorship or an informal collaboration between two labs: team science implies a deliberately structured collaborative model, usually formalized in the funding mechanism itself, that funders and institutions increasingly plan for rather than treat as an ad hoc exception to the traditional single-PI grant.
This guide covers what distinguishes team science from single-PI research, the interdisciplinary field that studies team science as its own subject (the “Science of Team Science,” or SciTS), why funders increasingly build team-based structures into their largest award mechanisms, and the specific administrative burden this shifts onto research offices: multi-PI leadership plans, cross-institutional agreements, and more complex authorship and credit accounting.
Team science vs. the single-PI model
The traditional model of federally funded research organizes a project around one principal investigator who holds scientific and administrative responsibility for the award, directs a lab or research group as subordinate staff, and is the institution’s single point of accountability to the funder. Team science reorganizes that structure in three ways that matter operationally, not just scientifically:
- Shared, not delegated, leadership. Two or more investigators hold formal, co-equal (or explicitly differentiated) authority over the project, rather than one PI supervising co-investigators or staff scientists.
- Genuine disciplinary breadth. Team science is most often invoked specifically for problems that a single discipline’s methods and expertise can’t adequately address — bringing together, for example, a clinical investigator, a statistician, a behavioral scientist, and an engineer around one research question, rather than assembling specialists who each work on a separable sub-piece.
- Structure that outlives any one investigator. Because authority and institutional participation are distributed rather than concentrated, a well-structured team-science project is more resilient to a single PI’s departure, illness, or loss of funding eligibility than a single-PI lab is — though this resilience has to be built in deliberately through the governance and succession provisions described below, not assumed automatically.
These are differences of structure and governance, not merely of team size — a large single-PI lab with many staff is not “team science” in this sense, and a small two-institution collaboration with a genuine shared-leadership structure can be.
The Science of Team Science (SciTS)
Team science is also the subject of its own field of research, generally referred to as the Science of Team Science (SciTS): the interdisciplinary study of how collaborative, cross-disciplinary research teams actually form, function, and succeed or fail, and what institutional and funder practices make effective collaboration more likely. The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) runs a dedicated Science of Team Science Initiative and maintains the Team Science Toolkit, a resource hub aimed at translating SciTS research findings into practical tools for teams and the administrators who support them. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has separately published consensus study work under the same banner, examining what evidence actually shows about what makes cross-disciplinary teams effective and what institutions can do to support them.
For a research administrator, the practical takeaway from SciTS scholarship is that effective team science doesn’t happen automatically just because a funding mechanism requires multiple institutions or investigators — team formation, governance clarity, and communication structure are themselves factors that predict whether a collaborative project succeeds, which is part of why funders like NIH require an explicit leadership plan (below) rather than leaving team structure undocumented.
Why funders increasingly build in team science
Several forces push major funders toward team-based award structures rather than treating multi-investigator projects as an exception:
- Scientific questions that genuinely require multiple disciplines. Problems spanning basic science, clinical application, data science, and implementation — precision medicine, climate adaptation, complex systems research — routinely exceed what any single discipline’s methods can address alone.
- Center- and program-scale mechanisms built explicitly for teams. Large award types are structured around multiple linked projects and shared resources from the outset: NIH Program Project (P01) and Center (P50, P30) grants, NIH cooperative agreements (U01, U19) with substantial federal programmatic involvement, and NSF mechanisms such as Engineering Research Centers and the NSF Convergence Accelerator, which is explicitly built around convergent, cross-disciplinary team research. These aren’t single-PI grants with extra co-investigators bolted on; team structure is a condition of the mechanism itself.
- Funders’ own team-science infrastructure. NIH maintains dedicated guidance and resources for multi-investigator applications (see the Multiple PD/PI policy below), and NCI’s SciTS initiative exists specifically because NIH treats effective collaboration as something to actively study and support, not assume.
Administrative implications for research offices
Team science shifts real administrative burden onto the sponsored-programs and research-administration offices that support it — it isn’t just a scientific-design choice with no operational consequence. Four areas carry most of that burden.
Multiple PD/PI leadership plans
NIH established its Multiple Principal Investigator (Multiple PD/PI) award option in 2006, allowing an application to designate more than one PD/PI with formally shared authority and responsibility for the project, rather than a single PI with subordinate co-investigators. Any NIH application designating multiple PD/PIs must include a Leadership Plan, which NIH reviewers evaluate and score as part of the application. A Leadership Plan typically needs to address:
- The rationale for using a multiple-PI approach rather than a single PI with co-investigators — why the science specifically calls for shared leadership.
- The governance and organizational structure of the leadership team, including how scientific and administrative decisions get made and how disagreements are resolved.
- Each PD/PI’s specific roles, responsibilities, and areas of authority.
- How budget and resources will be allocated across the team.
- Data-sharing and publication arrangements among the PDs/PIs.
One PD/PI must be designated the Contact PI, who serves as the single point of contact with NIH for programmatic and administrative matters, even though scientific authority may otherwise be genuinely shared. Other agencies use comparable but not identical structures — NSF, for example, designates co-PIs on a single award without an equivalent formal “Leadership Plan” requirement, so research offices supporting cross-agency portfolios need to track which mechanism applies per proposal rather than assuming NIH’s specific requirements transfer directly.
Co-authorship and credit complexity
A larger, cross-disciplinary team makes it harder to answer a question that’s already hard on a two- or three-author paper: who did what, and who qualifies as an author at all. Team science compounds the authorship questions CASRAI covers in depth on its CRediT & Authorship pillar — with more contributors, more disciplines, and more institutions in play, teams benefit specifically from a structured contribution-accounting system like the CRediT taxonomy (Contributor Roles Taxonomy, formalized as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), which records what each person actually did (conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, funding acquisition, and so on) rather than relying on author order alone to imply relative contribution. Research offices supporting large team-science awards should expect — and can proactively encourage — an explicit CRediT statement or equivalent contribution accounting on resulting publications, decided early in the project rather than negotiated after a paper is drafted, precisely because disputes over credit become more likely as team size and disciplinary breadth grow.
Cross-institutional agreements
Team science frequently spans institutions, which means the sponsored-programs office has to negotiate the legal and financial instruments that let multiple organizations participate in one award. Depending on the funding mechanism and each institution’s role, this typically means one or more of:
- A subaward from the prime recipient institution to a collaborating institution performing a defined portion of the work — see CASRAI’s guide to subaward agreement negotiation for how these get structured.
- A consortium agreement where a project involves multiple participating organizations under one overarching award, more common in large center- or program-scale mechanisms.
- Clarity, sometimes negotiated up front, on how intellectual property arising from a jointly conducted project will be owned and managed when investigators at more than one institution contribute to an invention — a genuinely more complex question than single-institution Bayh-Dole compliance, since it can involve joint ownership across institutions with different technology-transfer policies.
- Institution-specific conflict-of-interest disclosure and effort-reporting processes that now have to reconcile across every participating institution’s own policies, not just one.
None of these instruments is unique to team science — subawards and consortium agreements support plenty of conventional single-PI projects with one collaborating site. What team science changes is scale and frequency: a genuinely team-based center grant can involve negotiating and maintaining agreements with several institutions simultaneously, each with its own compliance offices, indirect-cost rates, and internal routing timelines, which is why research offices supporting team-science portfolios often need dedicated staff capacity or workflow just for multi-institutional agreement management.
Frequently asked questions
Is team science the same as having multiple PIs on a grant?
Not exactly — multiple PIs (a Multiple PD/PI designation, in NIH’s terms) is one common structural feature of team science, but team science more broadly refers to the collaborative, often cross-disciplinary research model itself. A project can have a Multiple PD/PI designation without being genuinely cross-disciplinary team science, and conversely, some team-science collaborations are structured with a single PI holding formal authority while still functioning as a genuinely collaborative, cross-disciplinary team underneath.
What is the Science of Team Science (SciTS)?
SciTS is the interdisciplinary research field that studies how collaborative research teams form, function, and succeed, and translates that evidence into practical guidance for funders, institutions, and team leaders. NCI’s Science of Team Science Initiative and Team Science Toolkit are the most prominent US federal resources in this space.
Does every NIH multi-investigator application need a Leadership Plan?
Yes — any NIH application that designates more than one PD/PI must include a Leadership Plan, and NIH reviewers evaluate and score it as part of the application. A single-PI application with co-investigators (rather than co-equal PDs/PIs) does not require this specific document.
Why does team science make authorship and credit more complicated?
More contributors, more disciplines, and often more institutions increase the odds that contribution and formal authorship credit drift out of alignment — the same underlying problem CRediT and ICMJE’s authorship criteria exist to address, just at greater scale and with more room for disagreement over who did what.
Do NSF and NIH handle multi-investigator projects the same way?
No. NIH has a formal Multiple PD/PI designation with a required, scored Leadership Plan and a designated Contact PI. NSF supports co-PIs on an award but does not use an identical formal leadership-plan requirement, so research offices should confirm the specific mechanism’s requirements rather than assuming NIH’s structure applies elsewhere.
Funder-specific team-science requirements and mechanisms change; always confirm current details directly against NIH’s, NSF’s, or the relevant funder’s own grants guidance before relying on them for a proposal.
