Edited by Paul Trunfio, Boston University, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Pablo G. Debenedetti July 24, 2018 (received for review March 1, 2018)
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.
Author contributions: Y.M. and B.U. designed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. P.T. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Modeling and Visualizing Science and Technology Developments,” held December 4–5, 2017, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, CA. The complete program and video recordings of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/modeling_and_visualizing.
Published under the PNAS license.
