How the ‘Matthew Effect’ helps some scientific papers gain popularity
Do scientific papers written by well-known scholars get more attention than they otherwise would receive because of their authors’ high profiles? A new study co-authored by an MIT economist reports that high-status authorship does increase how frequently papers are cited in the life sciences — but finds some subtle twists in how this happens. “We found that there was an effect of status,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-author of a paper on the subject, published this month in the journal Management Science. But that effect, he adds, is not “overwhelming.”The study reports that citations of papers increase by 12 percent, above the expected level, when their authors are awarded prestigious investigator status at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a major private research organization. However, certain kinds of research papers are boosted more than others by the increased prestige that...