Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager

It’s almost Nobel Prize time again. And, like with any event — Wimbledon, the World Cup or the Oscars — winners are a crapshoot to predict. But that doesn’t keep people from trying.

Take Thomson Reuters. Each year, it releases its Nobel Prize predictions. David Pendlebury, of the information corporation’s Research Services, counts whose discoveries are most cited in the research literature.

Citations give “a very strong signal of what the scientific community itself feels is an important work," Pendlebury told Scientific American. After the count, though, he said he always checks whether the scientists with the highest reported citations really did do pioneering work.

And the 2008 nominees are:

Three candidates for the physiology or medicine prize: a team that discovered how microRNAs regulate gene expression, a team of Oxford statisticians who first applied meta-analysis to clinical medicine and epidemiology, and a team who studied how toll-like receptors, which detect foreign microbes’ molecules, activate the immune system.

In physics, two University of Manchester researchers for their work on graphene, the thinnest material ever discovered. Carnegie Institution in Washington astronomer Vera Rubin also gets a nod for her work helping to prove the existence of dark matter.

Roger Tsien at the University of California San Diego is suggested for the chemistry prize. He found that the same chemical that makes jellyfish glow green is perfect for tracking biological reactions. Harvard’s Charles Lieber is also mentioned for his work on nanowires and nanomaterials.

These scientists “seem to be peers of people who have won the Nobel Prize in every way,” Pendlebury says (The Scientist). “They’re of Nobel class,” he says.

Thomson Reuters’ predictions are the most scientific; since 2002, Pendlebury has correctly chosen 12 out of roughly five dozen laureates. But not everyone agrees has jumped on the Thomson Reuters bandwagon. The Daily Transcript spouted off major cell biology discoveries like stem cells for the physiology or medicine prize. For the physics prize, ZiiTrend.com suggested Stephen Hawking, though he cannot yet receive the prize because his theoretical predictions have not been experimentally validated.

Have someone else in mind? Venture a guess at medGadget.com. If you pick the right discovery or scientist, you win an iPod nano (or three). Better hurry, though: the Nobel winners are announced starting Monday. If you just can’t wait, check out what happened at the incomparable Ig Nobel ceremony last night.