Is it possible that papers that get the awards help give the scientists new ways of looking at problems, while the papers that are frequently cited are more likely to follow established viewpoints and back it with hard data I can use to justify later experiments?
What I mean is, if a paper makes me think "wow, I've never though of this that way before, I wonder if I could try something like that with this...." I probably wouldn't cite it, right? Its not directly related. But I would probably give it an award for best paper because it helped me come up with a new approach to my own problem.
That's an interesting idea. For what it's worth, I would cite the publication which prompted the idea behind my approach, so I don't think this is the answer to your question.
That being said, I think you're onto something. I was recently involved in a project leading to a paper for a conference, and while I don't know whether it'll get accepted (meaning I don't know if it's even representative of the kinds of papers conferences want to see), I notice in hindsight that we had only a few citations that really informed a totally novel methodological approach we used. By contrast, we cited a ton of research in the domain area we studied.
So my takeaway is that it's hard to bring in dozens of papers to inform one's methods necessarily because methods (like a protocol) require one somewhat coherent narrative. Integrating the collective body of knowledge about a topic (like, oh let's say.. online labor markets) is a lot easier, making "rapid-fire" citations in that context more likely.
I'd like to see a seasoned researcher (or at least someone with the experience of a few publications) weigh in on this though.
Another issue is that "best paper" competitions tend to attract younger scientists who don't have the same "star power" to generate citations.
Star power in science is nothing to scoff at either. If Einstein was still about and writing papers you can be sure everyone and their grandmother would cite them, even if the papers were useless. Now, while that is an extreme example, many fields have their own "stars" that are credited with making significant gains in a particular area.
What I mean is, if a paper makes me think "wow, I've never though of this that way before, I wonder if I could try something like that with this...." I probably wouldn't cite it, right? Its not directly related. But I would probably give it an award for best paper because it helped me come up with a new approach to my own problem.
disclaimer: I am not a scientist.