Nobel Prize Survey 2008

The Nobel Prize as an Indicator for the Quality of Research
- an institutional view towards universities and countries

4th update of the Nobel Prize Survey - summer 2008

In the last survey from 2003 I wrote: ...the basic results of this third survey are more or less well known within the academic world. The importance and increasing dominance of the American universities is nearly common sense and the fact, that only a few institutions play a major role in the research world, will not really surprise most academics. This dominance of some handful of universities and research institutions shows again: don't underestimate the wellknown "big names"... That's also in 2008 still true. The US institutions are dominating in world class research. In seeing the various discipline the stronge dominance varies a little: strongest in Economic Sciences (88 % of all prizes), Medicine (about 68 % of all prizes), Physics (about 50 % of all prizes) and Chemistry (about 40 % of all prizes). Only a few European institutions are continously among the worldwide leading research institutions: the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the Max Planck Society in Germany succeed to contribute continously in Nobel Prize suspicious research. Some other famous Europeans like the University of London, University of Oxford, ETH Zuerich, Karolinska Institute or the Academy of Sciences Moscow will sometimes contribute... but one should not bet on these institutions.

So maybe the interesting developments related to institutions and Nobel Prizes are happening in the United States of America. The already in the last surveys describe tendencies are still appropriate: Harvard lost its unique and dominating position (stays still strong) and the more technical universities like Standford, the MIT, Columbia, Cornell and the CIT became stronger and form together with the Rockefeller Univeristy, Princeton, University of Chicago and UC Berkeley a very strong group and belong to the very big names in worldclass research. That's all not really new and the bis names quite often discussed or described. Interesting is the tendency that some more US universities may succeed to enter the above outlined group of leading institutions. Here especially the University of California System became relativly stronger and got Nobel Prize Laureates on various campuses. The UC Berkeley got supporters/competitors on several other campuses like the UCSB, UCLA, UCSD, UCI etc. Also some excellent results for the University of Washington, the University of Colorada and the UT Austin could be a sign that below the "real big names" some more research universities may become relativly stronger. So all in all the dominance of the US institutions in getting the Nobel Prizes will be pretty stable

And up to now: Asia is not coming. Still institutions in China, South Korea, Indonesia or Malaysia never hosted a Nobel Prize Laureate; India as another major country in Asia got once (in 1930) a Nobel Prize Laureate. And even Japan is with a total of seven prizes - related to its economic power - on a rather low level in research. Here for example the rather small Switzerland supported much more excellent research than all Asia (and one may include Australia, Africa and Southamerica too). In the last few years the only new country for getting a Nobel Prizes was Israel.

Hopefully also this survey will encourage the readers to discuss things and I will stay happy in getting (like in the last) some feedback and critical (or even cynical) comments.

(1) the website of the Nobel Foundation was clearly improved in the last view years and provides the most relevant information about the laureates and the research work. In addition to the Nobel Foundation many other websites will provide information about the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Laureates (like nobelprizes.com or the various contributions in wikipedias)

(2) The first survey was published in 1997; it started to analyze the nobel Prize Laureates with a focus on "their" research institutions. The second survey was published in 1999 and introduced for the analysis of changes a category covering the last 25 years only. Developments had been described for a) the whole century b) the period after World War II and c) the last 25 years. The third survey in 2003 had a focus on the developments of the last years. It compared for the relevant disciplines, countries and institutions the awards of the last 25 years with those of the last 15 years.

(3) The allocation of laureates to institutions is in most of the cases not really complicated. But of course, within a total of close to 600 laureates there are some difficult cases: either because the laureate changed the institutions (sometimes frequently) and it's difficult to allocate the relevant research work to a institution and/or because the institution is no longer existing or became part of another institution or company. In these cases the biography of the laureate and sometimes his/her own "given relevance" was taken.

Additional remark: over the last years more and more institutions went towards a kind of marketing in listing "their" Nobel Prize Laureates on their websites and brochures. Here some institutions "claim" the same Nobel Prize Laureate as "home institution" for the respective research and the allocation of the relevant research work towards an institution is in rare cases really difficult.

(4) The selection/classification of time periods and a comparison of periods is also all the time a critical issue. Is there a trend? What period is adequate for a trend? For the periods in the 2008 survey I took some arguments from Hobsbawm (Age of Extremes. The short twentieth century, 1914-1991, London 1994). A period from 1901-1949 (more the "Age of Catastrophe, although I accepted the prizes from 1901-1914 too), a period from 1950-1969 (more the "Golden Age", although I shortened the period by some years to compare periods of similiar lenght), a period from 1970-1989 (the "landslide period") and a period from 1990-2007 (more the turn towards the 21st century). For all kind of comparisons the period from 1901 - 1949 is less interesting. For trends the last decades are definitivly more interesting and choosing more or less twenty years as a period could be adequate to show some tendencies. Of course the Nobel Prize implicates a time lag: the research work and the time of the awards differs by many years (close to 20 years on average). For the next survey in 2010 we already started to consider the timelag of the research work of the Nobel Prize Laureate and the date of getting the award. The selected periods may fit to "adjust" the time lag in seeing the awards till 1969 still as related to an age that one may call "Age of Catastrophes".