Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today celebrates the five new Nobel Laureates across the fields of science and economics who were accurately identified as potential Nobel Prize recipients. Each individual was awarded the designation of Citation Laureate™ as much as 12 years prior to being named by the Nobel Assembly. Clarivate is the only organization in the world to use quantitative data together with expert qualitative analysis to identify the pinnacle realm of scientific contributions recorded in the Web of Science.™ Using this approach, Clarivate identifies researchers ‘of Nobel class’ and forecasts those who could be awarded the Nobel Prize.
This year, Clarivate anticipated Nobel Laureates in each category of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economics, demonstrating the association between the citation record which reflects influence throughout a research community and peer judgement. This is the third time in 10 years that Citation Laureates named by Clarivate have been awarded a Nobel Prize in all four of these categories, following success in 2011 and 2013. Since 2002, there have been 64 Citation Laureates who have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize.
The five Citation Laureates named as Nobel Laureates in 2021 are:
- The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, awarded to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.
- David Julius was identified as a Citation Laureate seven years ago in 2014. At that stage, Julius’ top ten-cited papers in the Web of Science Core Collection had been cited 22,372 times, putting him in the very top tier of the citation elite. He is our 60th Nobel awardee and the 16th individual who has gone on to receive a Nobel in the field of Physiology or Medicine.
- One half of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Giorgio Parisi, University of Sapienza, Rome, for ground-breaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems.
- Giorgio Parisi was identified as a potential Nobel honoree by Clarivate just a few weeks ago, in September 2021. His appearance on the list caused great excitement in Italy. As a result, he was interviewed widely by media outlets prior to the Nobel announcement, as the Clarivate program is seen as an accurate weathervane for identifying researchers ‘of Nobel class’. This brings the tally for Physics to 17 people since 2002.
- The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Benjamin List and David McMillan for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.
- Citation analysts at Clarivate identified Benjamin List as a potential Nobel awardee in 2009 for his pioneering research in the development of asymmetric organocatalysis. This makes him our 62nd Citation Laureate who has gone on to receive the Nobel Prize, and the 9th in Chemistry.
- The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, awarded jointly to David Card for his empirical contributions to labour economics and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for their methodological contributions to the analysis of casual relationships.
- Both David Card and Joshua Angrist were welcomed into the Hall of Citation Laureates back in 2013, for their advancement of empirical microeconomics. Their award brings our tally of Citation Laureates to be recognized for Economics to 16. Our analysis at the time stated, “The range of topics that they have studied is remarkable: unemployment, wages, unions, immigration, education, health insurance, terrorism, income distribution, regulation, methods. Their common approach to answering fundamental questions about how markets work has plainly had a great impact—not only deep but broad as well.”
To explain the success of Clarivate in identifying future Nobel Laureates, David Pendlebury, Chief Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate said, “Accurately predicting who will be awarded a Nobel prize is a challenge, as there are so many worthy individuals to choose from. The Nobel committees consult with 3,000 experts and examine the work of 250-350 preliminary candidates in their qualitative analysis. Here at Clarivate, we start with the data – a quantitative analysis of papers with 2,000+ citations, and our team of experts then adds a layer of qualitative analysis.”
Joel Haspel, SVP Strategy, Science at Clarivate said: “Our analysts are particularly skilled at using citation data to identify researchers whose human ingenuity changes the world for the better. We can also identify potential Nobel awardees, often many years before they come to the attention of the Nobel committee. Parisi’s inclusion raised a particularly loud cheer from our worldwide colleagues – he has only been a Citation Laureate for a matter of weeks.”
Notes to editors:
Methodology:
Each year since 2002, analysts at the Institute for Scientific Information™ at Clarivate have drawn on Web of Science publication and citation data to identify influential researchers across the globe whose contributions to science have been extremely influential, even transformative in the research areas recognized by Nobel Prizes: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Economics. The Web of Science is the world’s largest publisher-neutral citation index and research intelligence platform. It organizes the world’s research information to enable academia, corporations, publishers and governments to accelerate the pace of research. Out of some 52 million articles and proceedings indexed in the Web of Science since 1970, only 6,500 (or .01%) have been cited 2,000 or more times. It is from the authors of this group of papers that Citation Laureates are identified and selected – an approach unique to Clarivate in identifying researchers ‘of Nobel class’.