Nobel Prize could lessen the impact of award-winning scientist – 10/05/2023 – Science

Winning a Nobel Prize can change a life. Winners become known worldwide and, for many scientists, the recognition represents the pinnacle of their careers.

But what is the effect of winning such a prize?

John Ioannidis, a public health researcher at Stanford University, wanted to answer that question. Prizes like the Nobel Prize are “an important reputational tool”, but he questions “whether they actually help scientists become more productive and have more impact in their fields”.

In August, a team of researchers led by Ioannidis published a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science that attempted to quantify whether big prizes boost science. Using publication and citation patterns for scientists who have won a Nobel Prize or a MacArthur Fellowship — a so-called genius grant — the team analyzed how post-award productivity is influenced by age and career stage. Overall, laureates of either award were found to have had similar or lesser impact on their field.

“These awards do not appear to increase scientists’ productivity,” Ioannidis said. “It actually seems to have the opposite effect.”

The study contributes to a body of work that aims to demystify how awards shape the way science is done, although scholars differ on which factors awards are most important.

Since 1901, the Nobel Foundation has awarded prizes for groundbreaking achievements in physics, medicine and chemistry (in addition to prizes for peace, literature and, since 1969, economic research). The MacArthur Fellowship was founded in 1981 and, unlike the Nobel Prize, is awarded as an investment in an individual’s potential.

Ioannidis’ team studied the winners of both awards to take into account how age affects scientific productivity. On average, Nobel Prize winners are more likely to be older and more advanced in their careers compared to MacArthur fellows.

For the study, the team selected a sample of 72 Nobel laureates and 119 MacArthur fellows from this century and compared each awardee’s publication and citation count three years before receiving the award with three years after recognition. Publications gave a measure of the volume of new work a researcher was producing, while citations quantified the impact that work had on the field, Ioannidis said.

His team found that Nobel winners published roughly the same number of papers after receiving the prize, but post-award work had far fewer citations than pre-award work. On the other hand, MacArthur fellows published slightly more, but their citations remained approximately the same. The citation rate per article for both Nobel laureates and MacArthur fellows decreased after winning.

By analyzing direct trends by age, the team found that laureates of both awards who were 42 and older experienced a decrease in the number of citations and publications after winning. Recipients who were 41 years old or younger published more and were cited more, which the researchers say suggests that age plays a role in the scientific productivity of awardees.

But Harriet Zuckerman, a Columbia University sociologist who has spent her career following the lives and work of Nobel laureates, said it was difficult to boil down productivity into such simple metrics. The difficulty increases when generalizing across different fields of science, which have varying standards for publishing or citing work. In some fields, for example, more experienced scientists may not include themselves as authors to give early-career scientists a chance to shine.

While Zuckerman doesn’t necessarily link this to productivity, she also studied how Nobel winners’ publication and citation patterns fluctuated with age, career stage and other factors. She found that the experience with fame caused the biggest change—something Nobel winners deal with in ways that MacArthur fellows may not.

“They are treated by others, both within their fields and outside of science, often as celebrities, as people whose opinions count in everything,” she said. “This ends up causing a lot of distraction.”

Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, agreed that the difference between becoming a MacArthur fellow, which she did in 2008 at age 43, and a Physics Nobel laureate, which she did in 2020 at age 55 , is remarkable. “There’s a huge responsibility that comes with a Nobel in terms of really being identified as a leader in the world,” she said. For Ghez, this includes being a positive representation for women and defending the importance of science — two impacts that are not recorded in articles or citations.

Another reason Nobel laureates may see a drop in productivity is that they feel they have reached the pinnacle in an area of ​​research and want to try something new. “This is called a switching penalty,” said Dashun Wang, a Northwestern University researcher who analyzes scientific research and who was not involved in the study.

Wang found that this led to a temporary drop in the publication rate, but that this recovered after about three years. He argued that this should be seen as a positive thing.

“This means that these people want to continue pushing new frontiers,” he added.

When it comes to the Nobel specifically, the prize gives him the confidence and influence to pursue bigger, more ambitious ideas, according to Ghez. “Transformative work is known to not be measured well by citations.”

Ioannidis recognizes the limitations of reducing productivity to articles and quotes, as they only tell part of the story. “There are many other things that matter in the impact of science and society.”

But until there is data to quantify these benefits, Ioannidis still finds value in trying to assess the effects of the awards — and in pushing the community to think deeply about how to achieve more rigorous and impactful work. “Science is the best thing that can happen to human beings,” said Ioannidis. But how to best harness its benefits, he added, is a scientific question in itself.