The Matthew Effect

In 1968 the sociologist Robert Merton published something uncomfortable about how credit works in science. When a famous researcher and an unknown one arrived at the same discovery independently, the famous one was remembered. When the two published together, readers assigned the ideas to the name they already knew. The known became better known, the unknown stayed invisible, and the gap widened with every round of recognition. Merton named the pattern after a line in the Gospel of Matthew: to everyone who has, more will be given. The finding has held up since, and later studies of authorship confirm it directly, showing that in collaborations between an established scientist and lesser known co-authors, almost all the credit lands on the famous name whatever the actual contribution was.

There is a detail in the paper's own history that makes the point better than the paper does. Merton's work drew heavily on the doctoral research of Harriet Zuckerman, then his graduate student, who had spent years interviewing Nobel laureates. She is almost never named as the concept's co-author, and Merton himself later said she should have been. The paper about credit flowing to the famous name did exactly that.

The rates have since been measured. Eugen Tarnow surveyed members of the American Physical Society and asked them to judge how many coauthors on their own most recent paper genuinely qualified. Under the physicists' own guideline, the probability that a third or later coauthor was inappropriate settled at 23 percent, rising to 59 percent if authorship required a direct contribution to the discovery. He repeated the survey with pathologists and found the two fields close to identical.

A second study measured the same thing without asking. Respondents had been asked about their most recent published paper, and separately whether they had written the initial author list. On a paper with several authors, only a fraction should answer yes to that by chance. Far more did, which means people were recalling a paper where they had been central rather than the paper they were actually asked about. The inferred rate of forgotten authorship came out between 94 and 97 percent, against the 23 to 67 percent people reported when asked to judge consciously. Papers where your name sat at the end of the list do not come to mind as yours.

Two further numbers explain how it persists. Around 90 percent of respondents said their author list was assembled without reference to any public standard, and only 3 percent had ever refused someone who expected authorship without earning it.

That this happens in science is the smaller discomfort. The larger one is that you are inside the same equation. Your first strong client made the second easier to win and the third easier still, because each one became evidence for the next. The first good job on the CV did the recruiting for the second. The first thousand readers pulled in the next thousand. And it runs in reverse just as reliably, which is why two people of similar ability can end up in different worlds a decade apart, separated less by talent than by whose early advantage started compounding first.

That gives you two things to do with it. When you judge someone by their track record, remember the compounding before you credit all of it to ability, because a record is partly a measure of skill and partly a measure of when the accumulation started. And when you choose where to spend your own effort, put it where advantage accumulates rather than where it evaporates. Some work leaves an asset behind, a reputation, a piece of evidence, an audience that stays. Some work is simply consumed. The difference between the two, repeated over years, is most of the gap.

Source: Merton, The Matthew Effect in Science, Science, 1968. The paper drew heavily on Harriet Zuckerman's 1965 doctoral research on Nobel laureates. Later empirical work, including Larivière and colleagues, confirms that in collaborations between an established scientist and lesser known co-authors, most credit is attributed to the famous name regardless of actual contribution. The measured rates: Tarnow, Coauthorship in Physics, Science and Engineering Ethics, 2002, the pathology comparison in Cohen, Tarnow and De Young, 2004, and the inferred rates in Tarnow, Subconscious Ratings of Inappropriate Coauthorship in Physics, The Open Ethics Journal, 2008.

The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis, 2016

On how reputation and recognition attach themselves to particular names in a field, and on the two psychologists whose collaboration produced much of the research in this library.