Ho Fai Chan

The first cut is the deepest: repeated interactions of coauthorship and academic productivity in Nobel laureate teams

Despite much in-depth investigation of factors influencing the coauthorship evolution in various scientific fields, our knowledge about how efficiency or creativity is linked to the longevity of collaborative relationships remains very limited. We explore what Nobel laureates’ coauthorship patterns reveal about the nature of scientific collaborations looking at the intensity and success of scientific collaborations across fields and across laureates’ collaborative lifecycles in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. We find that more collaboration with the same researcher is actually no better for advancing creativity: publications produced early in a sequence of repeated collaborations with a given coauthor tend to be published better and cited more than papers that come later in the collaboration with the same coauthor. Our results indicate that scientific collaboration involves conceptual complementarities that may erode over a sequence of repeated interactions.

Do Nobel laureates change their patterns of collaboration following prize reception

We investigate whether Nobel laureates’ collaborative activities undergo a negative change following prize reception by using publication records of 198 Nobel laureates and analyzing their coauthorship patterns before and after the Nobel Prize. The results overall indicate less collaboration with new coauthors post award than pre award. Nobel laureates are more loyal to collaborations that started before the Prize: looking at coauthorship drop-out rates, we find that these differ significantly between coauthorships that started before the Prize and coauthorships after the Prize. We also find that the greater the intensity of pre-award cooperation and the longer the period of pre-award collaboration, the higher the probability of staying in the coauthor network after the award, implying a higher loyalty to the Nobel laureate.

Do the best scholars attract the highest speaking fees? An exploration of internal and external influence

This study investigates whether academics can capitalize on their external prominence (measured by the number of pages indexed on Google, TED talk invitations or New York Times bestselling book successes) and internal success within academia (measured by publication and citation performance) in the speakers’ market. The results indicate that the larger the number of web pages indexing a particular scholar, the higher the minimum speaking fee. Invitations to speak at a TED event, or making the New York Times Best Seller list is also positively correlated with speaking fees. Scholars with a stronger internal impact or success also achieve higher speaking fees. However, once external impact is controlled, most metrics used to measure internal impact are no longer statistically significant.

Does the John Bates Clark Medal Boost Subsequent Productivity and Citation Success

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients’ subsequent research activity and status compared to a synthetic control group of nonrecipient scholars with similar previous research performance. We find evidence of positive incentive and status effects that raise both productivity and citation levels.

The implications of educational and methodological background for the career success of Nobel laureates: an investigation of major awards

Nobel laureates have achieved the highest recognition in academia, reaching the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding. Owing to past research, we have a good understanding of the career patterns behind their performance. Yet, we have only limited understanding of the factors driving their recognition with respect to major institutionalized scientific honours. We therefore look at the award life cycle achievements of the 1901–2000 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine. The results show that Nobelists with a theoretical orientation achieved more awards than laureates with an empirical orientation. Moreover, it seems their educational background shapes their future recognition. Researchers educated in Great Britain and the US tend to attract more awards than other Nobelists, although there are career pattern differences. Among those, laureates educated at Cambridge or Harvard are more successful in Chemistry, those from Columbia and Cambridge excel in Physics, while Columbia educated laureates dominate in Physiology or Medicine.

Science prizes: Time-lapsed awards for excellence

Stephane Detournay suggests that both scientific research and music composition undergo phases of “onset, development, refinement and exposition” (Nature 499, 245; 2013). But so do hedge-fund management and tomato farming. One thing that binds music and science is the idea that sincere, personal investment in one’s work is good. Yet music is mainly about evoking, interpreting and savouring emotions, whereas science is essentially the pursuit of truth. Justin Jee New York University, New York, USA. justin.jee@med.nyu.edu Time-lapsed awards for excellence

Relation of early career performance and recognition to the probability of winning the Nobel Prize in economics

To explore the relation between early career performance or recognition and receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, we compare winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, the most prestigious early career recognition for economists, with other successful scholars. The initial comparison combines JBCM winners with scholars published in leading economics journals, controlling for educational background (institution conferring the Ph.D.) and publication and citation success. We then narrow the comparison group down to those given relatively early recognition (based on age category) in the form of other major awards. Lastly, we compare the JBCM awardees with synthetic counterfactuals that best resemble their pre-award academic career performance. All three analyses provide strong support for the notion that winning the JBCM is related to receiving the Nobel Prize, the award of which is also correlated with early career performance success as measured by number of publications and citations.

Do Men and Women Know What They Want? Sex Differences in Online Daters’ Educational Preferences:

Using a unique cross-sectional data set of dating website members’ educational preferences for potential mates (N = 41,936), we showed that women were more likely than men to stipulate educational preferences at all ages. When members indifferent to educational level were excluded, however, the specificity of men’s and women’s preferences did differ for different age groups. That is, whereas women expressed more refined educational preferences during their years of maximum fertility, their demand specificity decreased with age. Men’s specificity, in contrast, remained stable until the 40s, when it was greater than that of postreproductive women, and then was higher during their peak years of career-earnings potential. Further, when individuals’ level of education was controlled for, women (compared with men) were more likely to state a higher minimum preference for educational level in a potential mate.