The Nobel Prize winners will be among these candidates

“ Who will win the Nobel Prize this year” attracts lots of attentions at every year’s end of September and begining of October recent years. Several prizes, e.g. the Wolf prize, Lasker prize, Gairdner prize, etc., have been treated as the predictors of the Nobel Prize.

By analysing 100 highly prestigious academic awards listed in Meho(2020), we found that, compared with the period of 2000-2009, the fraction of Nobel laureates who have been recoginized by other famous awards is growing for Nobel Physics prize, Nobel Economics prize and Nobel Physiology or Medicine prize, as shown in Fig.1. Especially for Nobel Physiology or Medicine prize, the fraction is over 95% during 2010-2022. However, for Nobel Chemistry prize, the fraction drops. One possible reason is that some chemistry related awards were not included in the list of 100 awards.

Figure 1.

It is well-known that a small group of elite scientists receive a disproportionate share of awards (Jiang & Liu, 2018; Ma & Uzzi, 2018; Zheng & Liu, 2015). However, we can use the excitement surrounding Nobel Prize predictions to highlight scientists whose groundbreaking work advances human knowledge, even if they have not won a Nobel Prize yet or never.