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Do Nobel laureates change their patterns of collaboration following prize reception?

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. We have compared the publication records from Web of Science with those from Scopus for a random sample of 50 Laureates. On average, Scopus has 6.14 more publication records than the Web of Science database for each of Laureate.

  2. Nobel laureates who passed away before 1st January, 2015.

  3. Dropout rate is measured by the number of pre-award coauthors’ dropouts divided by the number of current pre-award coauthors.

  4. An abundant literature has shown significant gender difference in research collaboration structure; see Abramo et al. (2013) for a recent review.

  5. Results are available upon request.

  6. http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/.

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Acknowledgments

For advice and suggestions, thanks are due to two anonymous referees. We acknowledge financial support from the Australian Research Council (FT110100463).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland Behavioural Economics Group (QuBE), School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler

  2. Department of Economics, University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstrasse 30, 95447, Bayreuth, Germany

    Ali Sina Önder

  3. CREMA, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

    Benno Torgler

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  1. Ho Fai Chan
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Correspondence to Benno Torgler.

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Chan, H.F., Önder, A.S. & Torgler, B. Do Nobel laureates change their patterns of collaboration following prize reception?. Scientometrics 105, 2215–2235 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1738-8

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