Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: How Star Scientists Influence their Co-Authors

Abstract

Despite prior research that supports the link between collaborations with star scientists and their co-workers’ productivity, empirical findings on this relationship are surprisingly mixed. To address this, we theorize and empirically disentangle two mechanisms through which star peer effects can occur: a collaboration can convey a direct peer effect by acting as a pipe, through which ideas and knowledge are conveyed from a star to her co-workers, or an indirect peer effect by acting as a prism, meaning that a collaboration with a star signals the quality of her collaborators’ work to others. To investigate this, we examine the effect of collaborating on scientific publications with a star who either won, or was nominated for but did not win, the Nobel Prize in Physics. We use the death of a star to isolate pipes and do not find that the co-authors of Nobel Prize winners publish fewer articles than the co-authors of Nobel Prize nominees. Isolating prisms, we find that the articles of the co-authors of Nobel Prize winners that were published prior to the focal co-author’s first collaboration with the winner receive a citation boost after the Nobel Prize is awarded, relative to the co- authors of Nobel Prize nominees. Using an innovative measure of the recognition of pioneering research, we find that this difference in citations causes articles written by the co-authors of Nobel Prize nominees to experience a delay in recognition. Our results clarify how stars contribute to their co-workers’ productivity and provide evidence of the benefits that can arise from indirect peer effects.