{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0234612","title":"Work honored by Nobel prizes clusters heavily in a few scientific fields","abstract":"We aimed to assess whether Nobel prizes (widely considered the most prestigious award in science) are clustering in work done in a few specific disciplines. We mapped the key Nobel prize-related publication of each laureate awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry (1995-2017). These key papers mapped in only narrow sub-regions of a 91,726-cluster map of science created from 63 million Scopus-indexed published items. For each key Nobel paper, a median of 435 (range 0 to 88383) other Scopus-indexed items were published within one year and were more heavily cited than the Nobel paper. Of the 114 high-level domains that science can be divided into, only 36 have had a Nobel prize. Five of the 114 domains (particle physics [14%], cell biology [12.1%], atomic physics [10.9%], neuroscience [10.1%], molecular chemistry [5.3%]) have the lion's share, accounting in total for 52.4% of the Nobel prizes. Using a more granular classification with 849 sub-domains shows that only 71 of these sub-domains (8.3%) have at least one Nobel-related paper. Similar clustering was seen when we mapped all the 40,819 Scopus-indexed publications representing the career-long output of all the Nobel laureates. In conclusion, work resulting in Nobel prizes is concentrated in a small minority of scientific disciplines.","journal":"PLOS ONE","year":2020,"id":2804,"datarank":0.847542459709715,"base_score":3.091042453358316,"endowment":3.091042453358316,"self_citation_contribution":0.4636563680037475,"citation_network_contribution":0.3838860917059675,"self_endowment_contribution":0.4636563680037475,"citer_contribution":0.3838860917059675,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":21,"citer_count":21,"citers_with_citation_signal":15,"citers_with_endowment":15,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.4498,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-07-29","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":7204,"name":"Ioana Alina Cristea","orcid":"0000-0002-9854-7076","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":5151,"name":"Kevin W. Boyack","orcid":"0000-0001-7814-8951","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":148,"name":"John P. A. Ioannidis","orcid":"0000-0003-3118-6859","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":33,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}