Fresh teams are associated with original and multidisciplinary research

Teamwork is one of the most prominent features in modern science. It is now well understood that team size is an important factor that affects the creativity of the team. However, the crucial question of how the character of research studies is related to the freshness of a team remains unclear. Here, we quantify the team freshness according to the absence of prior collaboration among team members. Our results suggest that papers produced by fresher teams are associated with greater originality and a greater multidisciplinary impact. These effects are even stronger in larger teams. Furthermore, we find that freshness defined by new team members in a paper is a more effective indicator of research originality and multidisciplinarity compared with freshness defined by new collaboration relationships among team members. Finally, we show that the career freshness of team members is also positively correlated with the originality and multidisciplinarity of produced papers.