Evaluation Of International Academic Awards In Social Sciences

International academic awards are not only a basic element of modern scientific social organizations,but also has an important role in stimulating scientific research and innovation.Nowadays,academic awards have become an important part of the scientific system at the national,institutional and individual levels,and have played an important evaluation function,which has attracted extensive attention from both academia and the public.Although the awards system has an indispensable position in the modern scientific society,the systematic investigation and evaluation of academic awards are very limited.So far,relevant research has been limited to specific awarding subjects,using a single subjective scoring method,and most of them tend to be in the field of science and technology,resulting in a lack of systematic evaluation of awards in social sciences.Thus,this study focuses on the following issues: Are there academic awards with international influences in the social sciences? How to quantify the relative importance of these awards? What are the structural characteristics of the awards system and what are the influencing factors? What is the connection and interaction between the prestigious awards and the top universities? What can we learn from the international awards system for Chinese universities? This study used questionnaire survey,bibliometric method,and network analysis to systematically evaluate 180 international academic awards covering eight subjects in social sciences,and the institutional mobility network structure of the award laureates.Finally,through case studies,this study puts forward corresponding suggestions for winning and establishing international academic awards in social sciences by Chinese universities.The main findings are as follows:First,there are several high-reputation academic awards in the social sciences,and there is a clear stratification of the reputation of awards among disciplines.On the other hand,the network of co-awardees has a scale-free property,which indicates that the award system has a clear cumulative advantage phenomenon and a preferential attachment effect,which also reveals the allometric growth of the award's reputation in the view of network dynamics.Second,based on the citation data and co-awardees data,this study quantified the bibliometric impact and the network impact of 180 international academic awards in social sciences,and then evaluated the comprehensive impact of these awards.The results show that Economic awards commonly have a higher comprehensive impact,and there is a high correlation between the impact evaluation results and the reputation evaluation results.Third,through the establishment of the radial basis function neural network,the influencing factors affecting the reputation of the international academic awards in social sciences are analyzed.It is found that award history,monetary rewards,the type of awarding institution and the awarding ceremony influence the reputation of the award.Combining with the awards in the field of science and technology,the influencing factors were further verified and discussed through correlation analysis and locally weighted regression methods.Fourth,through the analysis of the directed mobility networks of 2176 laureates of 80 prestigious international academic awards,it is found that the institutional mobility networks of these laureates have a typical “core-periphery” structure,and also have a “groupuscule” phenomenon.These results reveal the hierarchical-stratified model of the laureate mobility networks;on the other hand,the diachronic analysis shows that the hierarchical-stratified networks can represent the national transfer and status change of the world-class universities;meanwhile,the level of hierarchical structures is becoming higher over time.Fifth,through the case study of 48 laureates with Chinese higher education backgrounds and 17 awards established by universities,this study summarized their typical characteristics.Suggestions have been proposed for Chinese universities,which include strengthening overseas exchanges of and cooperation among talents,focusing on the international influence of academic achievements,and expanding the talent training and introduction scale from world-class universities;establish international academic awards by top universities,control rewardoriented construction,reflect the value of awards and establish international awarding procedures.This study has three main innovative points.First,based on the co-awardees and citation data,the comprehensive influence of the international academic awards in social sciences had been evaluated accurately.Second,identified the importance of several influencing factors that affect the reputation of awards by using the radial basis neural network algorithm.Third,according to the characteristics of the institutional mobility networks of the awards' laureates,the hierarchical-stratified model of institutional mobility was proposed,which quantified and characterized the status changes of world-class universities.