Amdahl's law and scientific collaboration

Abstract

We apply some of the ideas underlying Amdahl's law - a result which is well known in computer science - and derive results on the effectiveness of scientific collaboration. We propose a simplified model and concentrate on two aspects of scientific collaboration, namely speed and quality. We find formulae describing the gain and the relative gain in time when collaborating on a scientific project. Similarly we propose a formula expressing the gain in quality when a scientific project is done in collaboration.