Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics

Ching Jin, Yifang Ma, Brian Uzzi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number5619
JournalNature communications
Volume12
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2021

Funding

Funding and extraordinary growth. Does funding explain the results? Funding can provide resources that may affect a topic’s growth and impact47. Also, funding agencies explicitly ration their funds to the most promising research topics48,49, which implies that topics that receive grants are seen by funders as having special growth potential. To examine whether funding differences between prizewinning and matched topics explain the extraordinary growth of prizewinning topics, we collected funding data on the subset of our data for which it is available. The NIH publishes funding data in the form of a public list of all papers funded by a specific grant. Using this list, we found that a subsample of 2853 out of the 11,539 prizewinning topics in our full sample received NIH funding from 1985 to 2005. For the sample of 2853 topics, we used DOM to create a new matched group of five non-prizewinning topics for each prizewinning topic, just as we did in the main analysis to ensure that the prizewinning and matched topic groups were balanced and met the parallel trends criteria. In this subsample, we used the same six matching criteria as in the main sample. Seventy-six percent of the matched topics turned out to also be NIH grant recipients, which makes sense, since funding should correlate with our six matching criteria. We thank Jonas Lindholm-Uzzi, Meghan Stagl, and Yiting Wen for their help in data collection. We thank Dashun Wang, Benjamin F. Jones, Hyejin Youn, Nima Dehmami, Yang Yang, Yuan Tian, Lu Liu, Junming Huang, Yi Bu, Sourav Medya, Yian Yin, Liqiang Huang, Zhixiang Ma, Yang Wang, Suman Kalyan Maity, Jian Gao, Binglu Wang, Wanqing Zhang, Qinghua Li and Mohammad Rassolinejad for helpful discussions. This material is based upon work supported wholly or in part by the Northwestern Institution on Complex Systems (NICO) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award number FA9550-19-1-0354.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Chemistry
  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Physics and Astronomy

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Scientific prizes and the extraordinary growth of scientific topics'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this