"So they gathered info on 35,000 papers in biomedical research where there was at least one Harvard author, calculated where the authors lived, and examined how influential the papers were — based on how many citations they received."
Hmm. The papers they looked at were from 1993 to 2003, and remote collaborative technology has improved a lot since then. Other teams may have very different dynamics that biomedical researchers and Harvard professors. Hard to know what to take away from it.
If you took 35 startups that span continents and are no more than 2 years old I think the results would be significantly different.
I've worked in close proximity and remotely - you can't beat a small team of motivated developers working where they are most comfortable - collaborating through Campfire, Google Docs and Github.
... as in, most often-cited papers are older (taking some time to amass the citations), and effective collaboration tools only became available much later?
Also, the progress that has been made on remote collaboration (say, Skype and DVCSs versus telephone and CVS) is significant. I won't say that there is no advantage to meeting in person, regularly, but the alternative "Researchers keep high-impact work within their own lab" does sound very credible.
Hmm. The papers they looked at were from 1993 to 2003, and remote collaborative technology has improved a lot since then. Other teams may have very different dynamics that biomedical researchers and Harvard professors. Hard to know what to take away from it.