In a new Comment in Nature Physics, Assistant Professor of Physics Chiara Mingarelli dives into the Nobel Prize nomination archives to understand how scientific recognition really works. The piece was inspired in part by the excitement of seeing our own colleague Michel Devoret recognized as a 2025 Nobel Laureate — a well-deserved honor that got the whole department buzzing. But Mingarelli went looking for one thing in particular: who had nominated Jocelyn Bell Burnell for the 1974 Physics Prize? Nobel nomination records are kept secret for 50 years, meaning the 1974 records had only just become searchable. It turns out no one nominated her — Bell Burnell was never put forward, so she could never have won.
“For decades, people blamed the Nobel Committee for overlooking Jocelyn Bell Burnell. But no one ever nominated her.”
Mingarelli went on to analyze the full nomination record, finding that laureates typically received 16 nominations before winning, while giants like Sommerfeld, Poincaré, and Meitner were nominated dozens of times and never won. She also asks whether the Nobel’s single-discoverer model can survive in an era of thousand-author papers. To carry out the analysis, Mingarelli built an interactive tool for exploring the archives, which is freely available.
See below for a link to the full article.