Nobels Start Tomorrow. The Real Shortlist Stays Sealed
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Oct. 4, 2026 (Sun.)
The Nobels Start Tomorrow. The Real Shortlist Stays Sealed for 50 Years.
This week's lists of favorites come from citation counts and betting odds. The actual nominations stay locked away until 2076 at the earliest.
In Three Lines
- The Nobel announcements begin Monday with medicine. The "frontrunners" in this week's coverage come from outside the committees, not from inside them.
- The Nobel Foundation keeps every nomination secret for 50 years. This year's will open no earlier than 2076.
- Even the opened files are not a vote count. One physicist was nominated 84 times and never won; one engineer was nominated once and won that same year.
On Monday morning in Stockholm, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute will name this year's prize in physiology or medicine. Physics, chemistry and literature follow on consecutive days. The peace prize comes from Oslo on Friday, and economics goes last, on Oct. 12. Between now and then, you will read a lot about who is likely to win.
Those lists can read like leaks from inside the committees, and it is easy to see why: the same names tend to come up year after year. None of them come from the people who decide. The prize committees do not release a single candidate. Every list you see this week was assembled by someone on the outside, making an educated guess.
The lists are built from citations and odds
For the science prizes, a widely quoted list comes from Clarivate, a research-analytics company. On Sept. 17 it named 22 "Citation Laureates," chosen largely by how often their papers have been cited by other researchers. This year's medicine group includes scientists whose work on the hormone GLP-1 underlies today's diabetes and weight-loss drugs.
Reporters have reason to lean on it. Since 2002, 89 of the 487 people Clarivate has named have gone on to win a Nobel. That is fewer than one in five, though, and many of them won years after their names first appeared. Clarivate itself says the program does not try to predict a given year's winners. The headlines do that part.
Literature has no citation data to mine, so bookmakers fill the gap. Because the Swedish Academy reveals nothing, odds posted by British betting sites become the closest thing to a shortlist, and the press reports them every year.
The real list opens in 2076 at the earliest
The Nobel Foundation's statutes bar disclosure of nominations, publicly or privately, for 50 years. The rule covers the nominees, the people who nominated them and the committees' own investigations and opinions. This year's files will become public in 2076 at the earliest. A college freshman reading this today will be close to 70 by then. It can take longer still: the 1974 records became searchable only recently.
The net is wide. For the physics prize, the committee sends confidential forms to about 3,000 people, mostly university professors and past laureates. Because many nominators submit the same names, the field usually comes to 250 to 350 candidates. David Haviland, a former chair of the physics committee, gave the inside numbers in an interview with his university, KTH in Stockholm, around 2020. The committee receives 500 to 550 nominations a year and commissions 20 to 30 expert reviews.
Think of a company promotion board. Recommendations arrive from across the firm, and you need at least one to be considered. But the board does not promote whoever collects the most. It asks around, reads the record and decides. It also does not announce who recommended whom. The Nobel committees keep that last part quiet for half a century.
Eighty-four nominations, no prize
Once the seal expires, the Nobel Foundation posts the records in an online nomination archive. Search it and you will find Arnold Sommerfeld, a German theorist who refined the early model of how electrons move inside the atom. Max von Laue, who had won the physics prize in 1914, nominated him first, in 1917. Max Planck, who launched quantum theory, put his name forward in several years. By 1951 the count stood at 84.
Sommerfeld never won. Nominations kept arriving in 1951, the year he died, and one of them reads, "First choice: A. Sommerfeld." His students did better. Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, names most of us met in high school physics, both took the prize.
It seems natural to assume that more nominations mean better odds. At the other end of the archive sits Gustaf Dalén, a Swedish engineer who built automatic regulators that switched lighthouse and buoy lamps on and off. His file holds one nomination, from 1912. He won the physics prize that same year.
Eighty-four nominations lost. One nomination won.
The Nobel Foundation makes the same point in the archive's own user guide. A nomination is not a vote, it says, and the number of nominations has no bearing on who wins. In promotion-board terms, a recommendation gets you into the room. How many people knocked on your behalf does not count once you are inside.
Some files stay closed past 50 years
The seal does not always lift on schedule. In physics and chemistry, if any nominee in a nomination is still alive, the entire nomination is left out of the public archive. If the nominator is alive, the name is replaced with "NN."
That rule touches one of the prize's most argued-over decisions. In 1967 a Cambridge graduate student named Jocelyn Bell, now Jocelyn Bell Burnell, spotted a regular pulse in the charts from a new radio telescope. It was the first known pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. The 1974 physics prize went to her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and the radio astronomer Martin Ryle. Critics have said for decades that the student who made the discovery was left out.
This March, Yale physicist Chiara Mingarelli searched the newly opened 1974 files. According to Yale's physics department, nobody had nominated Bell Burnell. If no nomination existed, the committee could not have chosen her, and the story would have a tidy ending.
Bell Burnell, though, is alive. Under the archive's rules, any nomination that named her would not appear in the public database yet. Nobody outside the committee can yet say what her absence from the record means.
The "frontrunners" we will read about this week are names picked from the outside, by counting citations and odds. Inside, nominations are not counted as votes. A recommendation puts a name in front of the board, and the members choose in the room. The record of that room stays closed for half a century or more. Tomorrow's name will come out of it.
Sources
- Source ↗ Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Prize announcements 2026
- Source ↗ Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination and selection of physics laureates
- Source ↗ Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination archive: manual and instructions
- Source ↗ Nomination archive, Arnold Sommerfeld
- Source ↗ Nomination archive, Nils Gustaf Dalén
- Source ↗ Clarivate press release, Citation Laureates 2026 (Sept. 17, 2026, via Nasdaq)
- Source ↗ Physics Today, Physics Nobel nominees, 1901–66
- Source ↗ KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Interview with David B. Haviland
- Source ↗ Yale Department of Physics, Nominations matter (March 16, 2026)
- Source ↗ Mingarelli, C. M. F., Nominations matter, Nature Physics 22, 334–335 (2026)
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