  Scientific revolutions affect funding, investments, and technological
advances, yet predicting their onset and projected size and impact remains a
puzzle. We investigated a possible signal predicting a topic's revolutionary
growth - its association with a scientific prize. Our analysis used original
data on nearly all recognized prizes associated with 11,539 scientific topics
awarded between 1960 and 2017 to examine the link between prizes and a topic's
unexpected growth in productivity, impact, and talent. Using
difference-in-differences regressions and counterfactuals of matched
prizewinning and non-prizewinning topics, we found that in the year following
the receipt of a prize, a topic experiences an onset of extraordinary growth in
impact and talent that continues into the future. At between five to 10 years
after the prize year, prizewinning topics are 38% more productive and 31% more
impactful in citations, retain 53% more incumbents, and gain 35% more new
entrants and 46% more star scientists than their non-prizewinning peer topics.
While prizewinning topics grow unexpectedly fast in talent and impact, funding
does not drive growth; rather, growth is positively associated with the recency
of work on the topic, discipline-specific rather than general awards, and prize
money. These findings advance understanding of scientific revolutions and
identify variations in prize characteristics that predict the timing and size
of a topic's revolutionary growth. We discuss the implications of these
findings on how funding agencies and universities make investments and
scientists commit time and resources to one topic versus another, as well as on
the quality of research.
