Beyond the Nobel Prize: scientific recognition and awards in North America since 1900

Abstract

There are various ways to assess the accomplishment and recognition of researchers in medicine and the life sciences, but the most visible form of scientific honour is an award. Awards and prizes are listed in CVs, grant proposals or job applications as a sign of excellence. Along with other markers, such as keynote lectures, major grants and citations, awards and prizes provide evidence of scientific recognition and prestige, even of academic celebrity. There are also quantitative measures of excellence, for example the Hirsch Index, which is based on citations. These play important roles when the progress and impact of individual scholars is being evaluated—for example, in academic promotion committees. Such citation metrics have been a growing field of interdisciplinary research for decades (even with their own journals, such as Scientometrics). By contrast, our understanding of prize cultures and their dynamics, in different countries or in specific fields, has remained surprisingly poor. This Special Issue is thematically grouped around prizes as presumptive parameters for excellence and impact. As scholars have shown, the number of prizes in the sciences and in medicine has increased considerably since the 1980s. There seems to be such an oversaturation of prizes that few experts maintain an overview of the ‘prize landscape’, even in their own field. This is true on the international arena, too: renowned prizes in one country are often unknown elsewhere. Only few scientific awards are celebrated around the globe among both scientists and laymen. With the following articles, we wish to explore cultures of scientific credit and academic excellence in medicine in North America since the turn of the twentieth century and to discuss the more general question of the functions and motives of prizes, the mechanisms of awarding them and the contexts in which some individuals become potential candidates. This Special Issue thus aims at describing and understanding the social and cultural mechanisms to be found in prize competitions. It