Have you ever dreamed of becoming a Nobel laureate?
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Disclaimer: This is a project for our Data
Visualization class, the focus is on the visualization.
The conclusions made may be imprecise and are
more for data exploration purposes.
More data
and more rigorous analysis are needed to examine the conclusions.
To investigate the question, we used a dataset that covers publication
records for almost all
Nobel
laureates in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine from 1900 to 2016 (545 out of 590,
92.4%).
We have designed 6 sub-questions to explore the possible answers.
Hover the mouse over the points for more information
The cumulative publication volume of the laureates before being awarded in the field of Chemistry is almost twice that of the fields of Physics and Medicine & Physiology. The distribution of scattered points also reflects that scholars in the field of Chemistry generally publish more papers than the other fields, especially after 1970.
The visualization results in the fields of Physics and Medicine & Physiology reflect that the number of publications in these two fields may not be one of the main contributing factors of a Nobel Prize.
We also notice that the cumulative number of published papers before being awarded is increasing. This trend is especially obvious in the field of Chemistry.
Papers that won the Nobel Prize are not necessarily the latest publications of the year. It is relatively normal to not to receive enthusiastic responses and win awards immediately after publication. Many publications have to wait for more than 10 years before they are awarded. The most common intervals between awards are 9, 11, and 16 years.
Hover the mouse over the bars for more information
On the contrary, quite a lot of documents waited for a long period. It may be because the research
involved was too advanced at its time of publication, hence was overlooked and had to wait for a
time when the insights from the research will be valuable.
These papers which involve "premature scientific discovery" or "delayed recognition" of the
literature are also known as "Sleeping Beauties".
Click on the year label to view the distribution for that year
The legend and play button is below the diagram
The cumulative number of papers published by award-winning scholars in the United States is significantly higher than that of scholars from other countries. After the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have more Nobel Prize winners than other countries. The former has highly recognized achievements in the field of Physics, while the latter has outstanding achievements in the fields of Medicine & Physiology.
It can be seen that the top three in the data are Harvard University, Cambridge University and Stanford University. Among them, Harvard University has significantly more Nobel Prize winners than other schools, 40% more than the second-ranked Cambridge University. It can be seen that it is well deserved to be ranked first in the QS ranking in 2016.
Hover the mouse over the name of institutions to view the connections more clearly
The more interesting phenomenon in the data is the biased research direction
of institutions/universities.
Compared with other disciplines, the field of Physiology or Medicine may be more
specialized, and hence
there are specialized institutions/universities to specialize in this direction. For
example, the research focus of Rockefeller University and the National Institutes of Health
is inclined to Physiology or Medicine. Although they may not be the best in terms of
comprehensive strength, they are the best in these fields. Researchers affiliated with them
have won awards even more than those of Harvard University.
Insights: when we choose a university, we should make choices based on our research interests and directions. A university with a higher ranking may not necessarily be the best solution.
Hover the mouse over the points for more information
Only 3 out of 590 laureates (0.51%) are awarded twice
The first person in history to accomplish the feat of twice receiving a Nobel Prize was the Polish
scientist Marie Skłodowska Curie (7th November, 1867- 4th July, 1934), first
awarded the prize in Physics and, later, in Chemistry. She was awarded for her researches in the
radiation phenomena, and then later, the discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
John Bardeen (23rd May, 1908 – 30th January, 1991) is the only scientist in history
to have received
two Nobel Prizes in the Physics category. He is first awarded for researches on semiconductors and
the discovery of the transistor effect, then awarded again for the theory of superconductivity,
jointly developed with two other laureates.
Frederick Sanger (13th August, 1918 – 19th November, 2013) is an enthusiast of
biochemistry who
succeeded in determining the amino acid sequence of a protein and, later, developing a method to
read DNA.
We want to investigate if there is an underlying relation between the topics in the three fields of
study. Therefore, we did a topic analysis using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)
model.
If there is a
clear distinction between the three fields, then each field should clearly incline to one of the
three topics. From the movement of circles within the ternary plot, we can tell that there is a
change in the topic that the laureates are interested in (each circle represent a laureate)
Slide left or right to find out
Year: 1907
Hover the mouse over the points for more information
Each circle represents a laureate;
its position
represents their topic of interest in that year (or average topic of interest, when all years are taken
into calulation)
Papers in the Medicine or Physiology field are highly inclined to Topic 2. Keywords
of Topic 2
includes penicillium, methylglutaryl, tumors, antifungal, lymphocyte, gastric and etc. We can see
that the LDA model performs best in differentiating the papers in this field.
However, this is not the case for papers from Physics and Chemistry. This may because of the
underlying close relation between these two fields. According to Wikipedia, they are
"branches of
science that both study matter" and "physics and chemistry may overlap when the system under study
involves matter composed of electrons and nuclei made of protons and neutrons".
Source of data: Scientific Data
Produced by Wong Xiangyu, Ooi Le Yi, Teoh Zhi Min | Data Visualization, Peking University, May-June 2023
Disclaimer: This is a project for our Data
Visualization class, the focus is on the visualization.
The conclusions made may be imprecise and are more
for data exploration purposes.
More data
and more rigorous analysis are needed to examine the conclusions.