Interpretive ethnographic studies and in-depth qualitative research should be treated as high-quality evidence in the science of team science

The Science of Team Science (SciTS) has an evidence problem. On the one hand, there are few studies demonstrating the effectiveness of evidence-informed team science trainings. On the other hand, SciTS has taken a relatively narrow view of what constitutes high-quality evidence of effectiveness. The field tends to privilege evidence generated from randomized controlled trials (RCTs), surveys of expert opinion, systematic reviews, and other methods of evaluation and assessment that are premised on narrow, experimental, or positivist understandings of what forms of knowledge are permitted to count as high-quality evidence. In this commentary, we suggest that SciTS ought to expand its understanding of what forms of knowledge can count as high-quality evidence. We argue that SciTS should include in-depth qualitative and ethnographic research programs that are not oriented around reproducibility or generalizability but instead focus on the value of specific studies, interpretive methods, and contextualized knowledge.