Scientific Prizes and the Extraordinary Growth of Scientific Topics

TL;DR

This study shows that scientific prizes significantly boost the growth, impact, and talent attraction of awarded topics, independent of funding, highlighting their role in scientific innovation.

Contribution

It provides large-scale, longitudinal evidence that scientific prizes are associated with extraordinary growth in scientific topics across multiple disciplines.

Findings

Prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers

Prizewinning topics gain 37-47% more new entrants and star scientists

Funding does not explain the growth of prizewinning topics

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 investigate 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.