  Emergent patterns of collective attention towards scientists and their
research may function as a proxy for scientific impact which traditionally is
assessed via committees that award prizes to scientists. Therefore it is
crucial to understand the relationships between scientific impact and online
demand and supply for information about scientists and their work. In this
paper, we compare the temporal pattern of information supply (article
creations) and information demand (article views) on Wikipedia for two groups
of scientists: scientists who received one of the most prestigious awards in
their field and influential scientists from the same field who did not receive
an award. Our research highlights that awards function as external shocks which
increase supply and demand for information about scientists, but hardly affect
information supply and demand for their research topics. Further, we find
interesting differences in the temporal ordering of information supply between
the two groups: (i) award-winners have a higher probability that interest in
them precedes interest in their work; (ii) for award winners interest in
articles about them and their work is temporally more clustered than for
non-awarded scientists.
