The 2014 Nobel Laureates will be announced next week. Here are some of the names you might expect to hear.
Each year, data analysts at the Intellectual Property & Science branch of Thomson Reuters attempt to beat the Nobel Prize committee to their own punchline by predicting who will take home the most prestigious prizes in science. Since 2002, they have successfully predicted thirty five Nobel Laureates in Physiology and Medicine, Chemistry, Physics and Economics. The so-called Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates are selected on just one criterion - how many times a specific study has been referenced by other scientists.
Despite the algorithm's decent track record, analyst David Pendlebury says there's only been one time he was really sure they had a Nobel Prize winner on their hands. That was last year, when the prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs for their "theoretical discovery" of the so-called Higgs Boson. That award was so widely and publicly anticipated that no alrogithm was necessary to predict it.
In general, though, Pendlebury says the number of Nobel Prizes is so small - at most three, selected from some 200 nominees, in turn drawn from millions of scientists worldwide - that it's unlikely any algorithm could predict the subjective selections made each year.
"When somebody wins the Nobel Prize that we have previously called a Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate on the basis of their publication and citation record, it's surprising," says Pendlebury. "It's surprising because of those odds."
Instead, Pendlebury says he looks at what he creates as a running list of scientists of "Nobel class," any one of whom could be considered for a Nobel Prize at any time. So who's names get added to the rolls of the Nobel class this year? See for yourself.