Matthew effects, or the tendency for early achievements in science to lead to more recognition and opportunities, are a potential source of stratification and lost innovation when they draw unreasonable attention away from equally innovative but less celebrated scholars. Here, we analyze whether prizewinners produce more innovative works before and after being awarded a prize compared to equivalently impactful non-prizewinning contenders. Our data covers the careers of prizewinners and their dynamically matched non-prizewinners, a longitudinal, science-wide sample of 23,562 scholars and 5.7 million publications. We measured the innovativeness of prizewinners' and non-prizewinners' publications in terms of their novelty, convergent thinking, and interdisciplinarity. We find that prizewinners display distinctive forms of innovativeness relative to their non-prizewinning counterparts in terms of combining ideas in novel ways, bridging foundational and cutting-edge work on a topic, and formulating approaches to problems that leverage the strengths of interdisciplinarity. Further, prizewinners' innovativeness is strongly predicted by their type of network embeddedness. In contrast to matched non-prizewinners, prizewinners have shorter-term collaborations, their collaborators tend to focus their attention on topics that are new to the prizewinners, and their collaborators' collaborators have minimal overlap.

翻译：马太效应，即科学领域的早期成就倾向于带来更多认可和机会，当其不合理地将注意力从同样创新但知名度较低的学者身上转移时，可能成为分层和创新损失的一个潜在根源。本文分析了获奖者与影响力相当但未获奖的竞争者相比，在获奖前后是否产出更具创新性的成果。我们的数据涵盖了获奖者及其动态匹配的未获奖者的职业生涯，这是一个纵向、覆盖全科学领域的样本，包含23,562名学者和570万篇出版物。我们从新颖性、聚合思维和跨学科性三个维度衡量了获奖者与未获奖者出版物的创新性。研究发现，相对于未获奖的同行，获奖者在以新颖方式整合观点、连接某一主题的基础性与前沿性工作，以及制定能发挥跨学科优势的问题解决方法方面，展现出独特的创新形式。此外，获奖者的创新性与其网络嵌入类型高度相关。与匹配的未获奖者相比，获奖者的合作期限更短，其合作者倾向于关注对获奖者而言是全新的主题，且合作者的合作者之间重叠度极低。