It’s that time of year…next week the winners of the Nobel prizes will be announced next Monday (Physiology/Medicine), Tuesday (Physics) and Wednesday (Chemistry).

Boston has had a pretty good showing recently, with Harvard’s Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), MIT’s Frank Wilczek (Physics, 2004), Robert Horvitz (Physiology/Medicine, 2002) and Wolfgang Ketterle (Physics, 2001) bringing home the glory in recent years.

And this year, local scientists haven’t disappointed, with three among the nominees. They are:

Physics

Alan Guth: physics professor, MIT

for his work on a cosmological model called inflation

Chemistry

Stuart Schreiber: chair of the chemistry and chemical biology department at Harvard, also the head of the chemical biology program at the Broad Institute

for his work using small molecules to learn about cell signaling pathways

David Evans: from the same department at Harvard

for his work on the synthesis of natural products

Thomson Scientific, the company responsible for, among other things, journal impact factors, is running a poll where you can vote on who you think will be the most likely winners. So far, Schreiber, Evans and Guth are lagging behind their competitors, but we’ll find out next week just how predictive this poll is.

Sorry, I’ve sheepishly just realized that these nominees are Thomson Scientific’s picks for the Nobels according to number of citations and high-impact papers published by authors. They are NOT the actual Nobel nominees. In fact, the Nobel Foundation is quite secretive about the nominees and nominators. Apologies for the error.

We’ll see this week how good of a predictor citations are for the Nobel prize winners. So far, it’s not looking like a very good predictor. We’ve just found out that Craig Mello (UMass Medical School in Worcester) and Andrew Fire (for their discovery of RNA interference) have won the Nobel prize in medicine/physiology and they were not among Thomson’s picks. Does a scientific achievement need to be highly cited to be deemed prize-worthy? Conversely, does a high number of citations means that a discovery is significant enough for an international prize?