This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
In 2011, Richard Freeman was working on a project.
He was studying the way groups of people work together, specifically how scientists work together.
Richard, who's a Harvard economics professor, noticed something intriguing.
Scientists in the United States seem to stick to their own kind.
You'd see chinese folk concentrated in one lab, indian folk concentrated in another lab, Europeans of different groups associating more with their compatriots.
This was not surprising.
You see this kind of clustering in lots of workplaces.
Marisha thought science ought to be different.
In general, people who are more alike are likely to think more alike.
And one of the things that gives a kick to science and scientific productivity is that you get people with somewhat different views, different perspectives coming together.
This assertion has long been debated.
Some people say teams with lots of different perspectives come up with better ideas.
Others say no.
When a group has lots of different views, this can produce conflict, gridlock.
So which is it?
Richard decided to put the question to the do scientists who collaborate with others from the same group produce better science or worse science, than scientists who have a wide network of collaborators?
To find out, Richard looked at one of the most important signals of scientific success, research publications.
He surveyed vast numbers of articles and papers, and he found that in a large number of these papers, co authors shared a common ethnicity.