Profitable a Nobel Prize is usually a life-changing occasion. The winners are thrust onto a world stage, and for a lot of scientists the popularity represents the top of their careers.
However what’s the impact of successful such a high-profile prize on science?
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford College, needs to seek out out. Awards just like the Nobel Prize are “a serious reputational instrument,” he mentioned, however he questions “whether or not they actually assist scientists turn out to be extra productive and extra impactful.”
In August, a crew of researchers led by Dr. Ioannidis printed a examine within the journal Royal Society Open Science that tried to quantify whether or not main awards push science ahead. Utilizing publication and quotation patterns for scientists who received a Nobel Prize or a MacArthur Fellowship — the so-called genius grant — the crew analyzed how post-award productiveness is influenced by age and profession stage. General, it discovered that laureates of both prize had comparable or decreased influence of their discipline.
“These awards don’t appear to reinforce the productiveness of the scientists,” Dr. Ioannidis mentioned. “If something, it appears to have the alternative impact.”
The researchers’ examine provides to a physique of labor that goals to demystify the methods wherein awards form how science is completed, although students have totally different opinions on what elements matter essentially the most.
Since 1901, the Nobel Basis has awarded prizes for groundbreaking achievements in physics, drugs and chemistry (along with prizes for peace, literature and, since 1969, financial analysis). The MacArthur Fellowship was based in 1981, and in contrast to the Nobel Prizes, is granted as an funding into a person’s potential.
Dr. Ioannidis’s crew studied winners of each prizes to account for the way age impacts scientific productiveness. On common, Nobel Prize winners usually tend to be older and additional alongside of their careers in contrast with MacArthur fellows.
For the examine, the crew chosen a pattern of 72 Nobel laureates and 119 MacArthur fellows from this century and in contrast publication and quotation counts of every awardee three years earlier than they obtained the prize with after the popularity. Publications gave perception into how a lot new work a scholar was producing, whereas citations quantified the influence that work had within the discipline, Dr. Ioannidis mentioned.
His crew discovered that Nobel winners printed about the identical variety of papers after receiving the award, however that post-award work had far fewer citations than pre-award work. MacArthur fellows, however, printed barely extra, however their citations remained about the identical. The speed of citations per paper for each Nobel laureates and MacArthur fellows decreased after successful.
When analyzing direct tendencies in age, the crew discovered that laureates of both award who had been 42 or older had declining citations and publication counts after their win. Recipients who had been 41 or youthful printed extra and had been cited extra, which the researchers mentioned prompt that age performed a task within the scientific productiveness of awardees.
However Harriet Zuckerman, a sociologist at Columbia College who has spent her profession monitoring the lives and work of Nobel laureates, mentioned that it was tough to distill productiveness into such easy metrics. The problem will increase when generalizing throughout totally different fields of science, which have various requirements for publishing or citing work. In some fields, for instance, senior scientists could not embrace themselves as authors to offer early-career scientists an opportunity to shine.
Although Dr. Zuckerman doesn’t essentially equate this to productiveness, she has additionally studied how the publication and quotation patterns of Nobel winners fluctuated with age, profession stage and different elements. She discovered that have with fame prompted the largest shift — one thing that Nobel winners cope with in a means wherein MacArthur fellows could not.
“They’re handled by others, each inside their fields and out of doors science, typically as celebrities, as individuals whose opinions depend on every part,” she mentioned. “It’s very distracting.”
Andrea Ghez, a College of California, Los Angeles, astrophysicist, agreed that the distinction between turning into a MacArthur fellow, which she did in 2008 at 43, and a Nobel physics laureate, which she did in 2020 at 55, is stark. “There’s an enormous duty that comes with a Nobel when it comes to actually being recognized as a frontrunner on the earth,” she mentioned. For Dr. Ghez, that features being a optimistic illustration for ladies and defending the significance of science — two impacts that aren’t recorded in papers or citations.
One more reason Nobel laureates may even see a drop in productiveness is that they really feel they’ve peaked in a single analysis space and wish to strive one thing new. “It’s referred to as pivot penalty,” mentioned Dashun Wang, a researcher at Northwestern College who analyzes scientific inquiry and who was not concerned within the examine.
Dr. Wang discovered that this led to a brief dip in publication charge, however that this bounces again after about three years. He has argued for seeing this as a optimistic.
“It means these individuals wish to proceed to push the frontier,” he added.
In relation to Nobel Prizes particularly, the award offers you the arrogance and clout to pursue greater, extra formidable concepts, based on Dr. Ghez. “Transformative work is well-known for not being nicely measured by citations,” she mentioned.
Dr. Ioannidis acknowledges the restrictions of boiling down productiveness to papers and citations, as a result of they inform just one a part of the story. “There are lots of different issues that matter within the footprint of science and society,” he mentioned.
However till there may be knowledge to quantify these advantages, Dr. Ioannidis nonetheless finds worth in attempting to evaluate the results of the awards — and in urging the group to assume deeply about methods to obtain extra rigorous, impactful work. “Science is the perfect factor that may occur to people,” Dr. Ioannidis mentioned. However methods to greatest exploit its advantages, he added, is a scientific query in itself.
