Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 50, Pages 12608-12615Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1800485115
Keywords
Nobel; genealogy; social networks; science of science; computational social science
Categories
Funding
- US Army Research Laboratory
- US Army Research Office [W911NF-15-1-0577]
- QUANTA: Quantitative Network-Based Models of Adaptive Team Behavior, Army Research Laboratory [W911NF-09-2-0053]
- NIH [R01GM112938]
- Kellogg School of Management
- Northwestern Institution on Complex Systems
- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF GENERAL MEDICAL SCIENCES [R01GM112938] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Scientific prizes confer credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, provide financial incentives, and promote community-building celebrations. We examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network. We focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists' propensities for prizewinning relate to knowledge pathways between disciplines and stratification within disciplines. Our data cover more than 3,000 different scientific prizes in diverse disciplines and the career histories of 10,455 prizewinners worldwide for over 100 years. We find several key links between prizes and scientific advances. First, despite an explosive proliferation of prizes over time and across the globe, prizes are more concentrated within a relatively small group of scientific elites, and ties among elites are highly clustered, suggesting that a relatively constrained number of ideas and scholars push the boundaries of science. For example, 64.1% of prizewinners have won two prizes and 13.7% have won five or more prizes. Second, certain prizes strongly interlock disciplines and subdisciplines, creating key pathways by which knowledge spreads and is recognized across science. Third, genealogical and coauthorship networks predict who wins multiple prizes, which helps to explain the interconnectedness among celebrated scientists and their pathbreaking ideas.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available