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Has Scientific Talent Shifted from Depth to Breadth?Evidence across Papers, Knowledge Inputs, Careers, and Teams

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 13, 2026 · UTC

Generative artificial intelligence raises a central question for scientific training and organization. Is research shifting from deep specialization toward broad individual knowledge? We examine this proposition across papers, cited knowledge, contributor histories, and teams using 47,959 articles from six fields over 2010-2025, 51,736 resolved cited works, and chronologically reconstructed prior publication histories for 1,754 randomly selected index contributors. From 2010 to 2022, team size increased by an estimated 37.3% (95% confidence interval [34.4%, 40.3%]), while paper topic breadth d

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T12:41:04.663Z. This is not the publication date.