Abstract
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigated one possible factor connected with a topic’s extraordinary growth: scientific prizes. Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37 and 47% more new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic’s growth. Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money. These findings reveal new dynamics behind scientific innovation and investment.
Highlights
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare
We investigated the statistical dynamics around a possible correlate of the onset of a scientific topic’s extraordinary growth: a topic’s association with a scientific prize[8,9]
The rapid, unexpected growth of scientific topics have long held a reputation in science because of their connection to unexpected shifts in research efforts, technology developments, and individual scientific careers
Summary
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. Case studies of Howard Hughes Medical Investigators and John Bates Clark and Fields medalists have shown that prizewinners’ papers published before their prize is conferred gain citations significantly faster than expected[10,11,12,14,15,22] after the prize and that winning one prize increases the probability of the same scholar winning future prizes[9] It is uncertain whether the link between prizes and unexpected growth for a single prizewinner’s work extends to changes in the growth of an entire topic, and current theoretical arguments and empirical work are nascent. An impression reinforced by the fact that prizewinners tend to move onto new topics after winning a prize[10,12] and the papers by matched contenders for the prize are concommitently cited less than expected[11,12]
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