The Geography of Nobel Prize Selection

Five countries account for over 80\% of Nobel-Prize-winning scientific discoveries. Because high-prestige recognition redirects resources and talent, the Nobel's geographic concentration can be self-reinforcing, yet whether it originates in the institutions that administer the prize or in the choices nominators make is unknown. We assembled a novel dataset from archival, parliamentary, and web-based sources across multiple countries and languages to construct a five-layer directed network spanning 8,134 entity-resolved individuals, 514,111 edges, and five prize categories (1901--1975). Despite the Swedish and Norwegian institutional core that oversees Nobel selection, the realized nominator pool was geographically diverse. Yet within that pool, nominators selected same-country nominees 4.85 times as often as expected (p < 0.001), ranging from 8.58 in Literature to 3.01 in Physics. This concentration persisted as the nominee pool diversified over seven decades. Within the observed selection pipeline, geographic sorting is concentrated at the discretionary nomination decision rather than in the realized composition of the nominator pool—a specific, targetable point in the selection process.