Academic recognition starts before the final decision
Imre Fertő
Academic prizes, appointments and honours are often treated as outcomes that reveal who has already demonstrated excellence. But recognition is also produced through institutional processes that determine who enters the field of consideration in the first place. Drawing on 35 years of nomination data from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, I show that disciplinary boundaries strongly structure this earlier stage of academic recognition – and that the relatively few scholars who cross these boundaries can play an important intermediary role.
When we think about academic recognition, we tend to focus on outcomes: who won the prize, received the fellowship, secured promotion or was elected to a prestigious academy. These outcomes are visible, consequential and relatively easy to study.
Yet by the time a formal decision is made, an important part of the selection process has already happened.
Candidates first need to become candidates. They must attract support, enter institutional consideration and acquire enough legitimacy for their case to proceed. Nomination is therefore more than an administrative preliminary. It is one of the mechanisms through which academic recognition is produced.
This matters because access to recognition may already be structured long before the final vote takes place.
In a recent study, I examined this process using nominations for corresponding membership of Class IX – the Economics and Law section – of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences between 1990 and 2024. Rather than asking who ultimately succeeded, I asked a prior question: how is nomination support organised?
The analysis covers 13 election cycles and 468 nomination ties made by members of Class IX. It reconstructs a network connecting nominators to nominees and uses this to examine disciplinary clustering, connections between disciplinary groups and patterns of co-nomination.
Academic fields remain powerful organising structures
The first result is striking in its consistency.
Across all 13 election cycles, scholars were substantially more likely to nominate candidates from their own disciplinary group than candidates from another field. Depending on the cycle, between 68.8% and 95.2% of nominations remained within disciplinary boundaries.
This pattern could simply reflect the composition of the Academy. If there are many economists among both nominators and nominees, for example, a large number of economist-to-economist nominations might emerge almost mechanically.
To address this, I compared the observed networks with 5,000 simulated networks for each election cycle. These simulations preserved exactly how many nominations each scholar made and how many each candidate received, but randomly reassigned the connections between them.
The difference was substantial. Observed disciplinary assortativity ranged from 0.518 to 0.924 across the 13 cycles, while the simulated networks produced values centred close to zero. In every cycle, the observed disciplinary clustering was substantially greater than would be expected from the structure of nominations alone.
In other words, disciplinary boundaries were not simply labels attached to an otherwise integrated selection process. They actively structured who supported whom.
This makes intuitive sense. Supporting a candidate is not a costless expression of abstract admiration. Nominators put their own judgement and reputation behind another scholar. Expertise, familiarity and professional proximity therefore matter. Scholars are generally better placed to evaluate – and perhaps more comfortable legitimating – work originating in intellectual communities close to their own.
Seen from this perspective, disciplinary homophily is not necessarily evidence of misconduct or deliberate exclusion. But it does show that supposedly collective institutions of recognition remain strongly organised through disciplinary communities.
Boundaries can be crossed – but crossing them is not the norm
Strong disciplinary clustering does not mean that the system is completely closed.
Cross-disciplinary nominations appeared in every period. But they constituted a minority of nominations and varied considerably between election cycles. The share of nominations crossing disciplinary boundaries ranged from just 4.8% in 1993 to 31.3% in 2021. There was no clear long-run trend towards either greater integration or greater closure.
More importantly, boundary crossing was not always evenly distributed among nominators.
In several cycles, scholars who nominated candidates across multiple disciplinary groups were also disproportionately active nominators. This suggests a distinction between two quite different forms of openness.
One possibility is a generally integrated system in which many participants routinely reach across disciplinary boundaries. Another is an institution that remains largely segmented, but in which a relatively small number of individuals serve as bridges between its different parts.
The evidence points more towards the second pattern.
This distinction matters because counting cross-disciplinary nominations alone can exaggerate how integrated a system really is. Ten cross-field nominations generated by ten different scholars describe a different institutional environment from ten cross-field nominations generated by one or two particularly active intermediaries.
Academic institutions can therefore be simultaneously strongly segmented and partially connected.
Recognition is not organised through one stable coalition
Nomination also has a collective dimension. Different nominators may repeatedly support the same candidates, producing patterns of co-nomination.
Looking at these relationships reveals a third feature of the system. Support was sometimes more concentrated and sometimes more diffuse, but it was generally not organised around a single dominant and persistent coalition.
This is important because co-nomination should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of coordination. Two scholars can support the same candidate independently. The network can therefore show patterns of alignment without telling us whether explicit coalition-building took place.
What it does show is that disciplinary closure, cross-field brokerage and the concentration of co-nomination are distinct features of the nomination process. A cycle can display relatively high levels of cross-disciplinary nomination but diffuse co-nomination, as in 2012. In another period, boundary crossing can coexist with somewhat more concentrated patterns of support, as in 2021.
There is therefore no single scale running from a “closed” to an “open” academic system. Institutional selection has several dimensions that need to be examined separately.
Across the whole period, the nomination system is best described as combining persistent disciplinary clustering, variable levels of boundary crossing and changing levels of co-nomination concentration.
Previous recognition may also matter before recognition
A supplementary analysis provides another piece of the puzzle.
Among scholars who had already entered the nomination process, previous nomination support was positively associated with the number of nominations they received in later cycles. In the fullest model, each additional prior nomination was associated with roughly a 12% increase in the expected number of nominations received in the current cycle, holding the other included characteristics constant.
This result should be interpreted cautiously. The analysis is descriptive and cannot establish a causal Matthew effect in which recognition mechanically produces further recognition.
Nevertheless, it draws attention to an important possibility: cumulative advantage may operate not only through prizes, publications or prestigious appointments, but already through repeated access to the nomination stage itself.
Visibility can accumulate before the final recognition is awarded.
To understand academic recognition, study its entry points
The broader implication is that research on academic recognition risks starting too late.
Studies of prizes, academy membership, promotion or funding understandably focus on final outcomes. But those outcomes emerge from an earlier infrastructure of attention and support. Before committees choose between candidates, institutional processes determine who becomes a plausible candidate at all.
The Hungarian Academy case shows that this infrastructure is far from socially or intellectually neutral. It is structured by disciplinary proximity, selective bridges between fields, changing patterns of shared support and the accumulation of previous nomination visibility.
This does not mean that nomination networks reveal why individual scholars supported particular candidates. The analysis cannot observe informal discussions, motivations or evaluative disagreements, and co-nomination is not proof of explicit coordination. Relatively small numbers of nominations in individual cycles also make strong claims about change over time inappropriate.
But precisely because nominations precede final selection, they offer a useful window into academic gatekeeping.
They shift the analytical question from “Who received recognition?” to “How did they become recognisable as candidates for recognition?”
That distinction has implications well beyond academies. Grant competitions, prizes, senior appointments, fellowship elections and other forms of peer selection all contain comparable entry points. Studying these earlier stages may reveal inequalities and institutional boundaries that remain invisible if researchers look only at final outcomes.
Future research could compare nomination networks across disciplinary settings, connect them with career and publication data, and examine whether gender, institutional affiliation or generational position shape access to nomination. These are dimensions the present analysis does not directly address.
Academic recognition is not simply bestowed at the end of a selection process. It is progressively assembled. Understanding who gets recognised therefore requires understanding the networks through which candidates first become visible, legitimate and institutionally selectable.
This post is based on the article: Imre Fertő, “Disciplinary Bloc Formation and Inter-Bloc Crossing in the Nomination Network of Class IX of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1990–2024)”, published in Szociológiai Szemle. The article is available at: https://doi.org/10.51624/SzocSzemle.22078
