Exploring the influence of coauthorship with top scientists on researchers’ affiliation, research topic, productivity, and impact

•The study is designed to explore the influence of different proximities and types of coauthorship with top scientists on their performance.•We identified the winners of four awards as top authors.•The closeness and type of coauthorships between the top and ordinary scientists are identified based on the author sequence and role.•The change of researcher performance considers four aspects quantitatively: affiliation, research topic, productivity, and impact.