Very simply, it's the fact that once you have acquired a certain visibility, you will be given more quality than in fact you have. I think it's the case for English. I'll be very frank.
We talk about “rent”. You can have rent on petroleum, like Alberta, and you can just sit on the rent. There is a linguistic rent that we never talk about. In Quebec, McGill and Concordia have a linguistic rent. We think they are better in the world classification of universities. I know very well those rankings. I wrote a lot of stuff on them. It's a linguistic rent, because if you are only a francophone in the world they won't see you as much as they will see an anglophone: “Yes, we know very well McGill and Concordia. What is this Université du Québec à Montréal? What is that?”
There is a linguistic rent, and the Matthew effect is the same thing. For example, if I write a paper with my student, he signs his name beside mine. Since I am quite known, to some extent, they will say, “Gingras wrote this paper.” I can tell them, no, I wrote it with my student, but they won't care. I will get the credit for that. That's the Matthew effect.
The Matthew effect also has an effect on the impact factor. That's a very important paper that we did. We were able to prove that the impact factor in itself has a Matthew effect. This is why we should forbid the impact factor at NSERC. I've asked that for many years, but NSERC doesn't want to do that. It should be forbidden on the committee for a member to say, “The impact factor of this journal is higher.” It should be forbidden. That's easy to do. It's a criteria that they should do at CIHR and SSHRC. In fact, SSHRC doesn't use it, but NSERC has this mania in biomedical sciences. Mathematicians don't use it much, because they know it's garbage.