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Mapping of important international academic awards

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Abstract

International academic awards are popular as incentives and rewards for academics all over the world, and have played a significant role in the performance evaluations of individuals and institutions. However, little is known about the relative importance of awards and the relationships between awards. This study aims to establish a comprehensive global map of important international academic awards, which visually presents the relative reputations of awards and the close or distant relationships between awards. By surveying the reputations of the preselected 207 awards, 90 important international academic awards with above-average reputations were identified. Then, based on the number of “awardees in common” or named “co-awardees” between every pair of these 90 awards, a network of co-awardees was built. Finally, using mapping software of VOSviewer, these 90 important international academic awards were mapped by taking the reputation scores as the weights of awards and the network of co-awardees as the basis of the relationships between awards.

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Notes

  1. This indicator measures the weighted number of faculty members of an institution who have won, in addition to the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the following awards, medals, and prizes covering virtually all academic disciplines: Abel Prize, Balzan Prize, Charles Stark Draper Prize, Crafoord Prize, Dan David Prize, Fields Medal, Fundamental Physics Prize, Holberg International Memorial Prize, Japan Prize, Kavli Prize, Kluge Prize, Kyoto Prize, Millennium Technology Prize, Praemium Imperiale, Pritzker Prize, Shaw Prize, Schock Prize, Templeton Prize, Turing Award, Wolf Prize, and World Food Prize.

  2. By 1983, the name of Tyler Ecology Award was changed permanently to the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Professor Jan Sadlak, the President of the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence, and Professor Paul Wouters, the Director of Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University, for their useful comments and suggestions on this study. We also wish to thank CWTS’s researcher, Dr. Ludo Waltman and Dr. Rodrigo Costas, for their kind help in solving some of the mapping technology problems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Juntao Zheng & Niancai Liu

Authors
  1. Juntao Zheng
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  2. Niancai Liu
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Correspondence to Niancai Liu.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Listing of the 207 international academic awards

See Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Table 5 21 Awards in multidisciplinary fields
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Table 6 36 Awards in life sciences and medicine
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Table 7 63 Awards in natural sciences
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Table 8 54 Awards in engineering sciences
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Table 9 33 Awards in social sciences
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Appendix 2

See Table 10.

Table 10 The response rates of reputation surveys in 16 subjects and fields
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Zheng, J., Liu, N. Mapping of important international academic awards. Scientometrics 104, 763–791 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1613-7

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