Revisions and FAQ

Referee Comments and Responses

This section describes this paper's path through review. We share the substantive parts of editors' reports (with permission), and explain how they shaped our changes to the paper. We tried to use AI to extract and share the substantive content of the referee reports, but after many attempts, we could not coax even the best language models to adequately summarize the main ideas.

What we submitted (May 26, 2026) Manuscript ↗

On advice of the editor and referees, we cut out the model and simulation (which we had added in response to earlier referees).

The paper was now very similar to our very first submissions to Science and Nature, but with more disciplined claims about misallocation and lost Einsteins, and various other improvements. We also added an analysis showing that fathers' occupation were correlated with prize fields — laureates in Physics were more likely to have fathers who were engineers, and laureates in Medicine more likely to have fathers who were surgeons. This was interesting because it showed that parent SES mattered through more than just raw income and access to education alone.

For this submission, we also created an interactive online appendix (https://devdatalab.github.io/nobel-prizes-appendix/), giving referees access to the raw laureates data and various other interactive exhibits that made it easier to explore different parts of the analysis.

Editor's comments (Jul 28, 2026)

R1: Not disclosed
R2: Not disclosed

[We are not sharing the editor's letter as this paper is still under review at REStat.]

How we changed the paper

As of September 30, 2026, the paper is conditionally accepted at REStat, and we are working on final revisions.