We are near the end of the Nobel Prize announcements for this year. But while many of us read all about the winners, many of us don't delve too deeply into those who are nominated. And this is unsurprising, as these results are sealed for 50 years. However, the Nobel Prize websitehelpfully has made its database open (at least for some of the prizes), allowing users to see who was nominated many decades ago.
For example, it is easy to see that Hans Krebs—who identified the Krebs cycle in biology—was nominated 17 times, beginning in 1946 until he finally won the Nobel Prize in 1953. On the other hand, Bertrand Russell was nominated only once for the Literature Prize in 1950, and won it on his first nomination. Or that Neville Chamberlain was nominated multiple times for the Peace Prize on the eve of World War II (he did not win).
And of course, you can do more large-scale analyses. For example, one paper has examined the nature of citations for both Nobel Prize winners as well as nominees in chemistry and physics and found that predicting winners is becoming more difficult. Others have found that winning the Nobel Prize, rather than simply being nominated, is correlated with living longer.
While there are lots of data analyses that are certainly possible, the nomination data do not seem to be easily downloadable from the site (please write in the comments if you've found a good way to play with the data!).
In the meantime, here is a simple visualization of the Nobel Prize nominations in literature by country, through 1950:
Clearly, Europe has the lion's share of the nominations. However, take this visualization with a grain of salt, since certain countries have changed names, this visualization is by no means canonical.
Nonetheless, don't forget about the nominees! They are interesting too. And there's a lot more of them than the winners, so they are just begging for statistical analysis.
Top image:Solis Invicti/Flickr/CC
