How do Price medalists’ scholarly impact change before and after their awards?

How a scholar's achievement and productivity may change by the award of an academic prize is a topic of a long-term interest in research fields such as scientometrics. Numerous studies have explored the impact of receiving a Nobel Prize, a Turing Award, and other international awards on laureates' scholarly performance, but relatively less attention has been paid to the impact of Derek John de Solla Price Medal on its recipients. This paper adopts the methodology of Structural Variation Analysis (SVA) to evaluate how Price medalists' research are impacted, if any, in terms of citation, h-index, and structural variation patterns in underlying collaborative networks. Moreover, we compare the SVA metrics with other indicators such as composite scores and Highly Cited Researchers (HCR). Our results show that: a Price Medal award may not necessarily boost the medalist’s scholarly potential, actual academic impact and collaboration patterns in a degree that is statistically significant. But the SVA method is a better indicator to evaluate the Price Medalist, especially in five-year time windows.