The significance and impact of winning an academic award: a study of early career academics

Jing Ren, Yajie Shi, Adrian Shatte, Xiangjie Kong, Feng Xia

Abstract: Academic award plays an important role in an academic's career, particularly for early career academics. Previous studies have primarily focused on the impact of awards conferred to academics who have made outstanding contributions to a specific research field, such as the Nobel Prize. In contrast, this paper aims to investigate the effect of awards conferred to academics at an earlier career stage, who have the potential to make a great impact in the future. We devise a metric named Award Change Factor (ACF), to evaluate the change of a recipient's academic behavior after winning an academic award. Next, we propose a model to compare award recipients with academics who have similar performance before winning an academic award. In summary, we analyze the impact of an award on the recipients' academic impact and their teams from different perspectives. Experimental results show that most recipients do have improvements in both productivity and citations after winning an academic award, while there is no significant impact on publication quality. In addition, receipt of an academic award not only expands recipients' collaboration network, but also has a positive effect on their team size.