The productivity of scientists working in a field that has recently won a high-profile award increases rapidly in the following decade. That is according to an analysis led by Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University in the US, which also finds that citations per person increase during that time as well. The ability to retain and attract scientists into the prize-winning field rises too.
The study was carried out using data from Wikipedia on 400 different scientific prizes – including the Nobel Prize, the Wolf Prize and the Turing Award – that were awarded 2900 times between 1970 and 2007. After cross-checking award information against prize webpages and news reports, the researchers assigned the prizes to scientific topics based on the winners’ previous work and data from Microsoft Academic Graph, which classifies scientific topics.
The researchers then matched each prize-winning field with five non-prize-winning areas that had identical growth patterns in the decade prior to the award. These links were made using criteria related to productivity and citations as well as the movements of scientists in and out of the fields of research. The work covered more than 11,000 scientific topics in 19 disciplines.
The analysis shows that the growth of prize-winning fields deviates significantly from non-prize-winning areas, which continue to grow as expected. “When a topic is associated with a prize, that topic grows in an unexpected and extraordinary way the year following the prize and for at least the next 10 years,” says Uzzi.
If the prize is given for recent research, it gives people a sense that there is going to be a boom of research around that topic
Brian Uzzi
A decade after the award, prize-winning fields produce 40% more papers and garner 33% more yearly citations than their matched non-prize-winning topics, the researchers found. Prize-winning topics also show an 8% increase in citations per person, per paper – compared with non-prize-winning areas. Meanwhile, the citation impact of leading scientists in the prize area is 25% greater than that of leading scientists in matched non-prize-winning fields – indicating that the rise in impact applies both to individual scientists and the prize-winning topic.
Alongside increases in productivity and impact, prize-winning fields retain 55% more scientists and gain 37% more new entrants. They also attract 47% more “star scientists” – the 5% most highly-cited researchers in a discipline – than matched non-prize-winning topics.
Opening doors
To assess whether funding impacts growth, the researchers looked at a subset of almost 3000 prize-winning topics that had received funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). They found that prize-winning topics do not benefit from more NIH funding than matched topics – both before or after a prize is awarded. “We didn’t find evidence to support the widely-held belief that money drives science,” says Uzzi. “Rather, it is a prize that has that effect.”
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According to Uzzi, scientists are always looking for areas where they think they can get the best returns. A prize increases the awareness of a scientific topic and creates “the perception that it is a growth area”. Indeed, Uzzi adds that their results show that the more recent the work the prize is given for, the greater the magnitude of extraordinary growth.
“If the prize is given for recent research, it gives people a sense that there is going to be a boom of research around that topic and a lot of opportunity,” he says. “But if you give it for something that was done 10 years earlier, scientists may perceive that the extraordinary opportunities have already taken place.”
