Research areas that win science prizes ‘see 40 per cent growth’

Research areas associated with prize-winning scientists experience a boost in publications of 40 per cent and a third more citations in the decade after such awards are announced, a new study suggests.

Such topics also attract almost 50 per cent more “star” scientists in the five to 10 years after the prize compared with comparable fields that are not associated with an award, according to the research.

For the study, researchers who won more than 400 science prizes awarded a total of almost 3,000 times between 1970 and 2007 – including “celebrated awards” such as the Turing and Wolf prizes – were associated with research topics where the winner was “considered to have made meaningful contributions”.

Data on the productivity and citation impact of these topics in the aftermath of the prize were then compared with the trajectory of “matched” non-prizewinning topics with similar past growth, disciplinary status and researcher make-up.

Relative to these matched research areas, prize-winning topics “are significantly more productive, [have] higher impact, and [are more] attractive to incumbent, rookie, and star scientists”, the study, published in Nature Communications, found.

Specifically, prize-winning topics produced about 40 per cent more papers and 33 per cent more citations in the five to 10 years after prize was awarded. They also retained 55 per cent more scientists, gained 37 per cent more new researchers and attracted 47 per cent more “star” scientists.

The study also found that the size of a topic’s growth was greatest when the prize carried a financial award and was “discipline-specific” rather than a general science prize.

Using data from the National Institutes of Health in the US, the researchers also “found no evidence that funding is related to the extraordinary growth of prize-winning topics” that they had identified.

The authors of the research, based at Northwestern University in the US and the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in China, said explaining why prizes were associated with topic growth would require further work. But existing research in the area suggested “that a prize-winning topic’s intellectual and professional attractiveness” rose after the prize was awarded.

Co-author Brian Uzzi, Richard L. Thomas professor of leadership at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, told Times Higher Education that being able to quantify the association of prizes with topic growth was “very significant” because it could help guide researchers and universities to where they could have maximum impact.

In addition, it could also help funders given that prizes offered a “valuable piece of information for predicting where to make investments that can do exceptional good”.

However, he added that prizes would only continue to have a positive impact on science “as long as they remain credible and are perceived as fair”. 

“If prizes began to be given out with the intention of driving growth on a topic…it is likely that prizes will lose their credibility and the positive effect of prizes on the growth and impact of topics will diminish,” he said.

Professor Uzzi added that they ran their analysis with and without the Nobel prizes – which he said were “special” examples in that often they are awarded for topics that had already demonstrated substantial growth over decades – but they did not change the results.

He said that the nature of the Nobels “rather reinforces” their findings “since many Nobel-prizewinning works and scholars have already won lesser prizes for the work” that goes on to win a Nobel.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com