Thomson Scientific chooses likely Nobel Prize Laureates
September 2006
Marie Curie …Linus Pauling… Max Planck ... Crick & Watson … There have been 776 Nobel Prize winners since it was first given in 1902. And every year, there is lively speculation about who will win the next Prizes. This year, the 2006 Nobel Prize winners will be announced beginning on October 2. In anticipation of this announcement, Thomson Scientific is revealing its own list of Citation Laureates … the researchers in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics most likely to contend for Nobel honors.
Focusing on high impact authors
Each year since 1989, Thomson Scientific has used citation data from ISI Web of KnowledgeSM to quantitatively determine Nobel Prize winners. Thomson Scientific is the only organization to use quantitative data to make its Nobel predictions. As David Pendlebury, Research Services, Thomson Scientific, explains: "There is a real relationship between who scientists cite and who they think are top researchers. Citations are the formal expression of intellectual debt, and by revealing this in a very large worldwide database such as Web of Science®, we have a unique perspective, field by field, of who are the leading players."
Considering the full picture of a scientist's contributions
In fact, Thomson Scientific Citation Laureates have been cited so often that they typically rank in the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of their respective fields, based on citations of their published papers over the last two decades. But the selection process involves more than simply adding up citation counts and the number of high impact papers. Thomson Scientific also considers the relevance and significance of the nominee's work, and other ways they may have been recognized by their peers, such as awards or prizes.
Find out more about the selection process, see who has been chosen as Thomson Scientific Citation Laureates for 2006, and vote for your choice of winners, at our nobel laureates web site.
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