What’s causing the dramatic increase in scientific collaboration? One possibility is that the rise of teams is a response to the increasing complexity of modern science. To advance knowledge in the 21st century, one has to master an astonishing amount of information and experimental know-how; because we have discovered so much, it’s harder to discover something new. (In other words, the mysteries that remain often exceed the capabilities of the individual mind.) This means that the most important contributions now require collaboration, as people from different specialties work together to solve extremely difficult problems.

But this might not be the only reason scientists are working together more frequently. Another possibility is that the rise of teams is less about shifts in knowledge and more about the increasing ease of interacting with other researchers. It’s not about science getting hard. It’s about collaboration getting easy.

While it seems likely that both of these explanations are true—the trend is probably being driven by multiple factors—a new paper emphasizes the changes that have reduced the costs of academic collaboration. To do this, the economists Christian Catalini, Christian Fons-Rosen and Patrick Gaule looked at what happens to scientific teams after Southwest Airlines enters a metropolitan market. (On average, the entrance of Southwest leads to a roughly 20 percent reduction in fares and a 44 percent increase in passengers.) If these research partnerships are held back by practical obstacles—money, time, distance, etc.—then the arrival of Southwest should lead to a spike in teamwork.

That’s exactly what they found. According to the researchers, after Southwest begins a new route collaborations among scientists increase across every scientific discipline. (Physicists increase their collaborations by 26 percent, while biologists seem to really love cheap airfare: their collaborations increase by 85 percent.) To better understand these trends, and to rule out some possible confounds, Catalini et al. zoomed in on collaborations among chemists. They tracked the research produced by 819 pairs of chemists between 1993 and 2012. Once again, they found that the entry of Southwest into a new market leads to an approximately 30 percent spike in collaboration among chemists living near the new routes. What’s more, this trend towards teamwork showed no signs of existing before the arrival of the low-cost airline.

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