  Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new
frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are
rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary
growth: scientific prizes. Our longitudinal analysis of nearly all recognized
prizes worldwide and over 11,000 scientific topics from 19 disciplines
indicates that topics associated with a scientific prize experience
extraordinary growth in productivity, impact, and new entrants. Relative to
matched non-prizewinning topics, prizewinning topics produce 40% more papers
and 33% more citations, retain 55% more scientists, and gain 37% and 47% more
new entrants and star scientists, respectively, in the first five-to-ten years
after the prize. Funding do not account for a prizewinning topic's growth.
Rather, growth is positively related to the degree to which the prize is
discipline-specific, conferred for recent research, or has prize money. These
findings reveal new dynamics behind scientific innovation and investment.
