The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters, US, has announced the 2008 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honours. This is in anticipation of this year's Nobel Prize winners to be announced in October.
Every year, data from ISI Web of Knowledge, a Thomson Reuters research solution, is used to quantitatively determine the most influential researchers in the Nobel categories of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. Because of the total citations to their works, these high-impact researchers are named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and predicted to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the future. Last year, five Citation Laureates were awarded Nobel Prizes. Since 2002, of those named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates, 12 have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
To select the 2008 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates, total citation counts and number of high-impact papers in the Nobel science fields were examined. These data were applied to categories within those scientific fields considered worthy of special recognition by the Nobel Committee: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. Based on these criteria, possible winners were selected.
The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters is claimed to be the only organisation to use quantitative data to make annual predictions of Nobel Prize winners. The Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates typically rank among the top one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of researchers in their fields, based on citations of their published papers over the last two decades.
