American researchers have explored how winning the Nobel Prize can affect the work of scientists. The findings show that publication activity, citation counts, and the novelty of ideas tend to slow down after the award compared with peers who win other prizes. The study appears in data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
David Studdard and his team examined Nobel Prize laureates in physiology or medicine from 1950 through 2010. They gathered measures of scientific output, focusing on the volume of published papers, the number of citations, and the novelty of the topics investigated. Novelty was evaluated using an algorithm that identified the core ideas in each publication and then traced the first appearance of those ideas within the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a shared medical terminology framework developed by the US National Library of Medicine. The researchers found that the closer a term appeared to its first entry in UMLS, the higher the study was considered to be in terms of novelty.
The analysis also considered the typical career arc of Nobel Prize winners, who are often at an advanced stage in their scientific journeys. To provide a broader context, similar statistics were collected for recipients of the Lasker Prize, another prestigious prize in medicine. The comparison showed that future Nobel Prize winners tend to publish more before the award than their Lasker Prize counterparts. On average over ten years, Nobel hopefuls produced one additional article and demonstrated stronger performance in citations and novelty prior to receiving the prize.
According to the researchers, the dip in productivity and impact after the prize is not caused by the award itself. Instead, the shift appears to reflect changes in the laureates’ lives after gaining global recognition. Fame brings new demands such as interviews, keynote talks, and commercial opportunities. For many laureates, the role expands beyond pure research into the sphere of public intellectual life, requiring time and energy for a wider range of activities.
Last year the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Memorial Center along with activists from Ukraine and Belarus. For more details about the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize recipients and the achievements cited in the nominations, see the accompanying material from socialbites.ca.