Earlier recognition of scientific excellence enhances future achievements and promotes persistence

Scientific awards play incentive roles in advancing scientists’ future career development, however, it is not clear how winning a scientific prize influences a scientist's future career persistence and performance across different disciplines and different career stages. To this end, we curated a representative dataset covering 1466 prizewinning scientists from 35 prestigious scientific prizes in seven disciplines. To investigate the potential benefits of one's academic career following the receipt of a prize, we matched each prizewinner with contenders to make sure that the winner and the contenders have comparable academic performance before prizewinning. Then the future performance of prizewinners and contenders in the same group are compared on three dimensions – productivity, scientific impact, and career persistence. Our findings suggest that after winning a prestigious prize, scientists generally publish more papers and receive more citations compared to their contenders. As for persistence, the Kaplan-Meier estimates on career length after the prizewinning show that scientists tend to maintain a longer active research career if their scientific merit are recognized via prizewinning. In addition, when dividing the prizewinners into three subgroups which are young, middle-aged, and senior prizewinners, we found that scientists tend to maintain a longer active career if they win prizes at the young or middle-aged career stage, while the difference is not significant between senior prizewinners and their contenders. Finally, we constructed a Cox proportional hazards model and found that the hazards of ending the academic career for young and middle-aged prizewinners are 59.5% and 31.1% lower than their contenders, respectively. This work highlights the importance of scientific merit recognition for scientists at their earlier career stage and provides strong implications for scientists’ career development.