Authors' status and the perceived quality of their work: Measuring citation sentiment change in nobel articles

Prior research in status ordering has used numeric indicators to examine the impact of a status change on the perception of a scientist's work. This study measures the perception change directly as reflected in citation sentiment, with the attainment of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry or a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine considered the status change. The article identifies 12,393 citances to 25 Nobel articles in PubMed Central and includes a control article set of 75 articles with 30,851 citances. The results show a moderate increase in citation sentiment toward Nobel articles postaward. Dynamically, for Nobel articles there is a steady sentiment increase, and a Nobel Prize seems to co‐occur with this trend. This trend, however, is not evident in the control article set.