To characterize impact of major research awards on recipients’ subsequent work, we studied Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics and MacArthur Fellows working in scientific fields. Using a case-crossover design, we compared scientists’ citations, publications, and citations-per-publication from work published in a 3-year pre-award period to their work published in a 3-year post-award period. 

Nobel Laureates and MacArthur Fellows received fewer citations for post- than for pre-award work. This was driven mostly by Nobel Laureates. Median decrease was 112 citations among Nobel Laureates (p = .003) and 21 among MacArthur Fellows (p = .744). Mid-career (42–57 years) and senior (>57 years) researchers tended to earn fewer citations for post-award work. Early-career researchers (<42 years, all MacArthur Fellows), tended to earn more, but the difference was non-significant.

MacArthur Fellows (p = .001) but not Nobel Laureates (p = .180) had significantly more post-award publications. Both populations had significantly fewer post-award citations per paper (p = .043 for Nobel Laureates, .005 for MacArthur Fellows, and .0004 for combined population).

If major research awards indeed fail to increase (and even decrease) recipients’ impact. One may need to reassess purposes, criteria, and impacts of awards to improve the scientific enterprise.

Data collection

For every scientist who met the selection criteria, we recorded age at time of award; field of study; and pre- and post-award citation counts, publication counts, and citations per publication. We defined pre-award papers as those published during the two years immediately before and during the year of an award, and post-award papers as those published during the second through fourth years after the year of an award. Thus, both the pre- and post-award periods are only three years. 

For pre-award and post-award papers, we counted citations, publications, and citations per publication accumulated during equal durations. For example, if a scientist won an award in 2004, the pre-award citation count includes citations received between 2002 and 2015 on papers published during 2002–2004, and the post-award citation count includes citations received between 2006 and 2019 on papers published during 2006–2008. We exclude papers published in 2005, because they may represent work done either before or after winning the award. Citations are counted until the end of 2019 for the post-award work and until the end of 2015 for the pre-award work. This means that for each awardee, 4–13 years of citations are counted depending on when the award was given, but for all of them citations for the pre-award and post-award work are counted over the same duration of time. 

We identified MacArthur Fellows and Nobel Laureates on macfound.org and nobelprize.org, and harvested citation counts from Scopus. Citation data for all papers of all study subjects were scraped from Scopus using the Python-based API-Wrapper Pybliometrics. Scraped data were validated against manually collected data for a random sample of authors. Data and analysis code are available at Dryad (Nepomuceno, et al., 2023).

Data scraping conducted using Python.

Data analysis conducted using R.