The Matthew Effect revisited: the social and cultural dynamics of awarding the Nobel Prize
What is excellence, and how does it come to be recognized? In a highly influential essay on the Nobel Prize, the sociologist Robert K. Merton hypothesized that scientific recognition was governed by a “Matthew Effect,” or a general tendency towards prior success bringing with it a disproportionate share of later resources and recognition. Merton’s initial conjecture has been confirmed in a great number of studies of scientific recognition, and similar processes of cumulative advantage have been observed in a variety of other social contexts. At the same time, the actual dynamics underlying the Matthew Effect remain poorly understood. This project aims to disentangle the social mechanisms underlying the Matthew Effect in Merton’s original case using a newly available database of Nobel Prize nomination materials. The database covers almost all science and literature prizes from 1901 to 1966, and contains 13,922 nomination letters. In addition, we have established a collaboration with the Swedish Academy which will give us access to unique data related to the literature prize. In order to sift through this vast amount of textual data, this project will employ new quantitative techniques made possible by recent advances in the computational analysis of textual sources. The project also has an important meta-methodological component comparing qualitative and computational approaches.
Final report
Project aims and development during the research period
The primary aim of the project was to disentangle the social mechanisms underlying the Matthew effect in the awarding of Nobel Prizes, based on newly available documents from the awarding organizations and cutting-edge methods for the analysis of text as data. A secondary aim was to assess the value of new methods of computational text analysis in connection with traditional qualitative and quantitative methods.
The research carried out in the project reflected the two objectives. The project team identified several social mechanisms that shaped prize decisions and examined their impacts using both historical records of the Nobel selection process and a large database of information on Nobel nominees, nominators, and the awarding organizations. The main outputs of the project demonstrated how computational techniques can be productively combined with regression analysis and close reading to answer fundamental questions about recognition processes in science and literature. Other presentations and publications addressed the meta-methodological aspects of the project and explored the interdisciplinary dialogues needed to integrate different methodological approaches.
The implementation of the project
The project was housed at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University. Data collection proceeded on two tracks. One part of the team focused on collecting and curating metadata on the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Literature. Data collection built on the Nobel Foundation’s digital database of nomination letters, which covered the period from 1901 to 1966. The names of nominees, nominators, and awarding organization members were then matched to library catalogues, bibliometric databases, and biographical dictionaries, which permitted the retrieval of information on publications, social relationships, and personal backgrounds. The other part of the team worked together with the Swedish Academy to identify archival materials that held the most promise for digitization. An initial effort to digitize the nomination letters themselves was abandoned in favor of the annual reports of the Nobel Committee and the reports of experts on individual candidates.
Data analysis was performed in collaboration with sociologists, computational social scientists, and historians. An important factor in the success of the project was the creation of an interdisciplinary environment in which the research could proceed. Although the core project team was composed of sociologists, every step of the project was influenced by researchers from other disciplines. Literary scholars, historians of science, statisticians, and computer scientists provided input on data collection, data curation, the analytical strategy, the interpretation of results, and the dissemination of findings.
The main results of the project and contributions to the research front
The main results of the project revealed a limitation of earlier research on the Matthew effect: experts do not always agree on what counts as excellence. As a result, the organizations responsible for awarding the Nobel Prizes had to perform considerable work to balance different preferences and reach decisions acceptable to global audiences. This finding is significant because similar mediation dynamics are likely to occur whenever evaluations must be made in the absence of a clear consensus.
For an overview of the contributions of the project, three outputs can be singled out. The first two examine the organizational work of awarding Nobel Prizes. The third reflects on the methodological questions of the project and draws broader implications for mixed methods research. Additional contributions are indexed in the list of scientific outputs.
1: Habinek (2023) considered the organizational work of the Swedish Academy in recognizing excellence in literature. This paper introduced the concept of scalar mediation to describe how the Academy bridged the different and sometimes contradictory judgements made by literary experts and produced decisions that “scaled up” and appeared legitimate before global audiences. The results showed that the development of scalar mediation within the Swedish Academy was a slow, uncertain, and contested process, which underwent several transformations before the Nobel Prize in Literature became a self-evidently global prize. The earliest decisions favored the tastes of conservative literary academies or rejected the preferences of other cultural authorities entirely. Only after 1945 did the prize recognize cosmopolitan literary pioneers and world-renowned thinkers with any regularity.
2: Habinek and Zheng (2024) turned to the Nobel Prize in Physics. This paper focused on the role of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in mediating between the divergent interests of nominators. In the case of physics, international nominators favored highly recognized, largely theoretical research, while Nordic nominators preferred experimental and observational research with ties to the region. Mediation work within the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences consisted of balancing award decisions across both groups, giving the Nobel Prize to the candidate with most support from the international physics community in some years, and to the Nordic candidate in other years. As in the case of literature, international nominators increasingly gained the upper hand after the Second World War.
3: Kappes and Habinek (2023) stepped away from the Nobel Prize to consider how researchers using different methods exchange knowledge while retaining their own distinctive identities and practices. The paper proposed the concept of “social mechanism trading zones” to describe one method of communication between scientific cultures with different methodological perspectives. The central claim is that theoretical statements taking the form of social mechanisms are especially productive when they are used to anticipate, incorporate, or respond to the empirical findings of other scientific cultures, and are less productive when they are used in pursuit of a grand theoretical or methodological synthesis. The claim is illustrated using two examples drawn from contemporary sociology.
New research questions generated by the project
The project has shown that the organizational work behind the Nobel Prizes was more complex than anticipated. The databases and digital corpora constructed for the project have the potential to yield many more insights into the dynamics of recognition in science and art. Of particular interest is the relationship between recognition within Sweden and the wider world. Future research will examine how exactly the awarding organizations went about balancing the recommendations of different audiences, with a special focus on decisions to oppose the preferences of international nominators. This research will add to knowledge of recognition dynamics at both national and global scales.
Another follow-up project will examine recognition dynamics within the Swedish literary field. This research will draw upon the same methodological strategy developed in the project, but apply it to a digital corpus of Swedish novels that has been matched to literary reviews and metadata on authors, critics, and social contexts. This project builds upon the collaboration with the Swedish Academy, but one key difference from the completed project is that it will be organized as an interdisciplinary research environment from the very start in order to yield continuous and productive exchanges between disciplinary perspectives.
Collaborations and dissemination of research results
The results of the project were presented at eight international academic conferences and twelve invited seminars and workshops. The project team also organized a two-day workshop on the methodological questions of the project entitled “Mixed Methods in the Science of Science,” which took place at the Swedish Institute of Athens in December, 2022. The project also led to partnerships with two other research groups that yielded four more workshops. Together with the European Network for the Science of Science, the project leader organized two workshops in 2021 and 2022 in Helsinki, Finland, and Odense, Denmark, respectively. The collaboration with the Swedish Academy along with researchers in Germany led to two international symposia at the German Literature Archive in the same years. The research on the Nobel Prize in Literature received media attention in Sweden and Germany as a result of the symposia.
The project also played an important role in the Masters’ Program in Computational Social Science run by the Institute for Analytical Sociology. The masters’ program supplied student interns for the project and the project provided educational opportunities for the students. Three students have completed theses using project data, and five students who worked within the project are now enrolled in PhD programs in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The primary aim of the project was to disentangle the social mechanisms underlying the Matthew effect in the awarding of Nobel Prizes, based on newly available documents from the awarding organizations and cutting-edge methods for the analysis of text as data. A secondary aim was to assess the value of new methods of computational text analysis in connection with traditional qualitative and quantitative methods.
The research carried out in the project reflected the two objectives. The project team identified several social mechanisms that shaped prize decisions and examined their impacts using both historical records of the Nobel selection process and a large database of information on Nobel nominees, nominators, and the awarding organizations. The main outputs of the project demonstrated how computational techniques can be productively combined with regression analysis and close reading to answer fundamental questions about recognition processes in science and literature. Other presentations and publications addressed the meta-methodological aspects of the project and explored the interdisciplinary dialogues needed to integrate different methodological approaches.
The implementation of the project
The project was housed at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University. Data collection proceeded on two tracks. One part of the team focused on collecting and curating metadata on the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Literature. Data collection built on the Nobel Foundation’s digital database of nomination letters, which covered the period from 1901 to 1966. The names of nominees, nominators, and awarding organization members were then matched to library catalogues, bibliometric databases, and biographical dictionaries, which permitted the retrieval of information on publications, social relationships, and personal backgrounds. The other part of the team worked together with the Swedish Academy to identify archival materials that held the most promise for digitization. An initial effort to digitize the nomination letters themselves was abandoned in favor of the annual reports of the Nobel Committee and the reports of experts on individual candidates.
Data analysis was performed in collaboration with sociologists, computational social scientists, and historians. An important factor in the success of the project was the creation of an interdisciplinary environment in which the research could proceed. Although the core project team was composed of sociologists, every step of the project was influenced by researchers from other disciplines. Literary scholars, historians of science, statisticians, and computer scientists provided input on data collection, data curation, the analytical strategy, the interpretation of results, and the dissemination of findings.
The main results of the project and contributions to the research front
The main results of the project revealed a limitation of earlier research on the Matthew effect: experts do not always agree on what counts as excellence. As a result, the organizations responsible for awarding the Nobel Prizes had to perform considerable work to balance different preferences and reach decisions acceptable to global audiences. This finding is significant because similar mediation dynamics are likely to occur whenever evaluations must be made in the absence of a clear consensus.
For an overview of the contributions of the project, three outputs can be singled out. The first two examine the organizational work of awarding Nobel Prizes. The third reflects on the methodological questions of the project and draws broader implications for mixed methods research. Additional contributions are indexed in the list of scientific outputs.
1: Habinek (2023) considered the organizational work of the Swedish Academy in recognizing excellence in literature. This paper introduced the concept of scalar mediation to describe how the Academy bridged the different and sometimes contradictory judgements made by literary experts and produced decisions that “scaled up” and appeared legitimate before global audiences. The results showed that the development of scalar mediation within the Swedish Academy was a slow, uncertain, and contested process, which underwent several transformations before the Nobel Prize in Literature became a self-evidently global prize. The earliest decisions favored the tastes of conservative literary academies or rejected the preferences of other cultural authorities entirely. Only after 1945 did the prize recognize cosmopolitan literary pioneers and world-renowned thinkers with any regularity.
2: Habinek and Zheng (2024) turned to the Nobel Prize in Physics. This paper focused on the role of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in mediating between the divergent interests of nominators. In the case of physics, international nominators favored highly recognized, largely theoretical research, while Nordic nominators preferred experimental and observational research with ties to the region. Mediation work within the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences consisted of balancing award decisions across both groups, giving the Nobel Prize to the candidate with most support from the international physics community in some years, and to the Nordic candidate in other years. As in the case of literature, international nominators increasingly gained the upper hand after the Second World War.
3: Kappes and Habinek (2023) stepped away from the Nobel Prize to consider how researchers using different methods exchange knowledge while retaining their own distinctive identities and practices. The paper proposed the concept of “social mechanism trading zones” to describe one method of communication between scientific cultures with different methodological perspectives. The central claim is that theoretical statements taking the form of social mechanisms are especially productive when they are used to anticipate, incorporate, or respond to the empirical findings of other scientific cultures, and are less productive when they are used in pursuit of a grand theoretical or methodological synthesis. The claim is illustrated using two examples drawn from contemporary sociology.
New research questions generated by the project
The project has shown that the organizational work behind the Nobel Prizes was more complex than anticipated. The databases and digital corpora constructed for the project have the potential to yield many more insights into the dynamics of recognition in science and art. Of particular interest is the relationship between recognition within Sweden and the wider world. Future research will examine how exactly the awarding organizations went about balancing the recommendations of different audiences, with a special focus on decisions to oppose the preferences of international nominators. This research will add to knowledge of recognition dynamics at both national and global scales.
Another follow-up project will examine recognition dynamics within the Swedish literary field. This research will draw upon the same methodological strategy developed in the project, but apply it to a digital corpus of Swedish novels that has been matched to literary reviews and metadata on authors, critics, and social contexts. This project builds upon the collaboration with the Swedish Academy, but one key difference from the completed project is that it will be organized as an interdisciplinary research environment from the very start in order to yield continuous and productive exchanges between disciplinary perspectives.
Collaborations and dissemination of research results
The results of the project were presented at eight international academic conferences and twelve invited seminars and workshops. The project team also organized a two-day workshop on the methodological questions of the project entitled “Mixed Methods in the Science of Science,” which took place at the Swedish Institute of Athens in December, 2022. The project also led to partnerships with two other research groups that yielded four more workshops. Together with the European Network for the Science of Science, the project leader organized two workshops in 2021 and 2022 in Helsinki, Finland, and Odense, Denmark, respectively. The collaboration with the Swedish Academy along with researchers in Germany led to two international symposia at the German Literature Archive in the same years. The research on the Nobel Prize in Literature received media attention in Sweden and Germany as a result of the symposia.
The project also played an important role in the Masters’ Program in Computational Social Science run by the Institute for Analytical Sociology. The masters’ program supplied student interns for the project and the project provided educational opportunities for the students. Three students have completed theses using project data, and five students who worked within the project are now enrolled in PhD programs in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.