Hollywood's Award-Winning Elite Inspire Scientific Research

Citation analysis reveals the Academy Awards® noteworthy contributions to the global scholarly research landscape

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Feb 17, 2015, 12:42 ET

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world's leader in intelligent information for businesses and professionals, is celebrating the 2015 Academy Awards® by recognizing its significant impact on academia as identified by Thomson Reuters Web of Science^TM, the premier scientific search and discovery platform and industry authority in science, social science, and the arts & humanities citation indexes.

Analysts from Thomson Reuters ScienceWatch, an open resource on research metrics and evaluation, reviewed hundreds of research papers indexed within the Web of Science to identify the 10 papers that best demonstrated the Awards' influence on academia as denoted by citations, or how many times each paper was explicitly footnoted in subsequent works. Citation data serves as a key metric in gauging the visibility, significance, and interrelationship of scholarly work.

"This study is a testament to the variety and breadth of discoverable connections possible within the Web of Science," said Jessica Turner, global head of Government and Academia at Thomson Reuters. "The selected papers span multiple disciplines and topics, including medicine, economics, sociology, gender and disability."

The most-cited paper explores a potential increase in a winner's life expectancy, while others evaluate the financial "worth" of an award, or examine an apparent gender discrepancy that tends to consign performances by award-winning actresses to films of lesser stature compared to those of male actors.

Here is the list of the selected papers ranked by their number of citations:

1	D.A. Redelmeier, S.M. Singh, "Survival in Academy Award-winning actors and actresses," Annals of Internal Medicine, 134 (10): 955-62, 2001.
2	M.P. Sylvestre, E. Husztl, J.A. Hanley, "Do Oscar winners live longer than less successful peers? A reanalysis of the evidence," Annals of Internal Medicine, 145 (5): 361-3, 2006.
3	R.A. Nelson, et al., "What's an Oscar worth?" Economic Inquiry, 39 (1): 1-16, 2001.
4	D.K. Simonton, "Film awards as indicators of cinematic creativity and achievement: A quantitative comparison of the Oscars and six alternatives," Creativity Research Journal, 16 (2-3): 163-72, 2004.
5	G. Rossman, N. Esparza, P. Bonacich, "I'd like to thank the Academy, team spillovers, and network centrality," American Sociological Review, 75(1): 31-51, 2010.
6	Pardoe, D.K. Simonton, "Applying discrete choice models to predict Academy Award winners," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A – Statistics in Society, 71: 375-94, 2008.
7	D.K. Simonton, "The 'best actress' paradox: Outstanding feature films versus exceptional women's performances," Sex Roles, 50 (11-12): 781-94, 2004.
8	S.P. Safran, "Disability portrayal in film: Reflecting the past, directing the future," Exceptional Children, 64 (2): 227-38, 1998.
9	M. Addis, M.B. Holbrook, "Consumers' identification and beyond: Attraction, reverence, and escapism in the evaluation of films," Psychology & Marketing, 27 (9): 821-45, 2010
10	S.P. Safran, "Movie images of disability and war: Framing history and political ideology," Remedial and Special Education, 22 (4): 223-32, 2001.

Visit ScienceWatch to view the full analysis. Learn more about the Web of Science.

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Jen Breen
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Molly Malone,
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SOURCE Thomson Reuters