Tracking research performance before and after receiving the Cheung Kong Scholars award: A case study of recipients in 2005

The Cheung Kong Scholars Program has become a nationally important, high-level talent plan. In this study, we determined whether the research output and coauthorship pattern of Cheung Kong Scholars changed after their receipt of the award. We selected the 83 recipients of the 2005 Cheung Kong Scholars Award and identified a total of 11,522 Science/Social Sciences Citation Index papers published between 1996 and 2015 by these awardees. The analysis was divided into two 10-year periods—the preaward (1996–2005) and postaward (2006–15) periods—to investigate changes in the scholars’ research performance. The results revealed that the number of papers authored by each Cheung Kong Scholar increased significantly, and there were also significant increases between the two periods in terms of average citation count and journal impact factor, suggesting that the quality of the scholars’ papers improved in tandem with the quantity. Second, a quadrant chart revealed that individuals exhibited different trends in productivity and impact, but their impacts’ distribution in the postaward period was much more concentrated than that in the preaward period. Third, the scholars’ coauthorship patterns changed significantly after receiving the award—not only their number of coauthors per paper significantly increased but also their authorship role changed significantly. In both number and proportion, they became less likely to act as the first author, but more likely to be listed as the last author. Furthermore, they published more papers as corresponding author, and more papers as the first, corresponding, or last author, though their proportion did not change significantly.