DOI: 10.5061/dryad.pc866t1rx
title: Impact of major awards on the subsequent work of their recipients

description: To characterize impact of major research awards on recipients’ subsequent
 work, we studied Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physiology or
 Medicine, and Physics and MacArthur Fellows working in scientific
 fields. Using a case-crossover design, we compared scientists’ citations,
 publications, and citations-per-publication from work published in a
 3-year pre-award period to their work published in a 3-year post-award
 period.  Nobel Laureates and MacArthur Fellows received fewer
 citations for post- than for pre-award work. This was driven mostly by
 Nobel Laureates. Median decrease was 112 citations among Nobel Laureates
 (p = .003) and 21 among MacArthur Fellows (p = .744). Mid-career (42–57
 years) and senior (&gt;57 years) researchers tended to earn fewer
 citations for post-award work. Early-career researchers (&lt;42 years,
 all MacArthur Fellows), tended to earn more, but the difference was
 non-significant. MacArthur Fellows (p = .001) but not Nobel Laureates (p =
 .180) had significantly more post-award publications. Both populations had
 significantly fewer post-award citations per paper (p = .043 for Nobel
 Laureates, .005 for MacArthur Fellows, and .0004 for combined population).
 If major research awards indeed fail to increase (and even decrease)
 recipients’ impact. One may need to reassess purposes, criteria, and
 impacts of awards to improve the scientific enterprise.
description: <strong>Data
 collection</strong> For every scientist who met the selection criteria,
 we recorded age at time of award; field of study; and pre- and post-award
 citation counts, publication counts, and citations per publication. We
 defined pre-award papers as those published during the two years
 immediately before and during the year of an award, and post-award papers
 as those published during the second through fourth years after the year
 of an award. Thus, both the pre- and post-award periods are only three
 years.  For pre-award and post-award papers, we counted
 citations, publications, and citations per publication accumulated during
 equal durations. For example, if a scientist won an award in 2004, the
 pre-award citation count includes citations received between 2002 and 2015
 on papers published during 2002–2004, and the post-award citation count
 includes citations received between 2006 and 2019 on papers published
 during 2006–2008. We exclude papers published in 2005, because they may
 represent work done either before or after winning the award. Citations
 are counted until the end of 2019 for the post-award work and until the
 end of 2015 for the pre-award work. This means that for each awardee, 4–13
 years of citations are counted depending on when the award was given, but
 for all of them citations for the pre-award and post-award work are
 counted over the same duration of time.  
 We identified MacArthur Fellows
 and Nobel Laureates on macfound.org and nobelprize.org, and harvested
 citation counts from Scopus. Citation data for all papers of all study
 subjects were scraped from Scopus using the Python-based API-Wrapper
 Pybliometrics. Scraped data were validated against manually collected data
 for a random sample of authors. Data and analysis code are available at
 Dryad (Nepomuceno, et al., 2023).
description: Data scraping conducted using Python. Data
 analysis conducted using R.