The Impact of Knowledge Diversity on Scientific Output: Distinct Effects from Collective and Individual Perspectives

Knowledge diversity plays a pivotal role in shaping research outputs in scientific collaboration. However, most previous studies measuring knowledge diversity at the article level implicitly treat collaboration members as a homogeneous whole, which can lead to aggregation bias. This study proposes a dual-perspective framework for measuring knowledge diversity in scientific collaboration, distinguishing between the individual perspective—each collaborator is treated separate individual—and the collective perspective—all collaborators are treated as an integrated entity. Using articles published in Nature between 2000 and 2020 as a test dataset, knowledge diversity is measured across three dimensions: variety, balance and disparity, and the impact of knowledge diversity on academic impact and disruption of output is examined. The results reveal divergent effects between individual and collective perspectives: individual knowledge variety and disparity enhance impact and disruption, whereas excessive collective variety and skewed balance undermine impact; collective disparity supports higher impact overall, but very high individual disparity may dampen disruption. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between the two perspectives of knowledge diversity and provide a refined lens for optimizing team composition and knowledge integration in scientific collaboration.