Want a Nobel Prize? Try Being Named John: A Bayesian Survival Analysis of Award Timing
The Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine is awarded once a year to scientists whose work a committee in Stockholm has judged to besufficiently important. We ask a narrower question: among scientists good enough to plausibly win one, what predicts how long they wait? We assemble a pool of 1,043 candidates from the Wolf Prize, the Lasker Award, the Gairdner Award, and the Clarivate Citation Laureates and fit a Bayesian Weibull accelerated-failure-time model with two competing hazards, one for winning and one for dying first. By raw effect size, the two largest predictors of wait time are not citations, institutional prestige, or field: they are how quickly a discovery was first recognised by a precursor prize, and the scientist's first name. The first of these has an obvious explanation. The second does not. The least surprising finding in this paper is also the most robust: once name, mentorship, and recognition lag are accounted for, where you trained and how many papers you wrote add almost nothing. Hitherto, none of this will surprise a working scientist. We publish it anyway.