In early October, the 2013 Nobel Prizes will be announced, spotlighting some of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the last several decades. It’s the Super Bowl, Eurovision, and Election Night of science, all rolled into one, and as with those touchstones of sports, culture, and politics, significant effort has gone into predicting the outcomes.
Perhaps the best annual prognostication comes from Thomson Reuters’ IP & Science division; analysts examine academic paper citations, sprinkle in some intuition based on past awards and subject matter, and generate a list of “Nobel class” researchers.
Since the analysis began, Thomson Reuters has correctly predicted 27 individual awardees, accounting for 15 of the 44 possible prizes in Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry. This is a remarkable number, given the estimated 7 million publishing scientists in the world (according to the OECD). David Pendlebury is the analyst responsible for the special sauce predictive formula. “We look at the scientists who have published one or multiple highly-cited discovery accounts,” he explains, “that have generally been cited thousands of times” by subsequent scientific journal articles. And it’s not necessarily a contemporary reading: the prizes generally recognize work done 20 or 30 years earlier, work that has stood the test of time and proved its worth in the context of larger scientific enterprise.
What follows are Pendlebury’s picks for this year’s – or future years’ – Nobel prizes, your inside track to headlines of coming weeks. “We like to honor highly cited scientists who have made remarkable discoveries. Many of these people of Nobel class will never win, but at least we can shine a spotlight on their achievements.”
Image: The coveted Nobel Prize. (Wikimedia Commons)
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