The identities of top contenders for annual Nobel Prizes are kept under wraps during the nomination and selection process, no one quite knowing what happens behind the committees' closed doors. That secrecy doesn't stop a few brave organizations from trying to predict the winners every year, often with varying degrees of success.

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Publishing and information company Thomson Reuters released their list of finalists yesterday. Using data from ISI Web of Knowledge (part of Thomson Scientific started by The Scientist founder Eugene Garfield ), the company compiles a list of Citation Laureates -- top researchers that have accumulated stratospheric citation totals and written several high-impact papers during their careers. Thomson Reuters made its first formal predictions in 2002, but bibliometricians working for the company and using the same citation method published their picks in The Scientist as early as 1989. Twenty-seven of their choices have gone on to win a Nobel Prize, although sometimes years after they were originally chosen by Thomson Reuters.

The company tapped two teams and one lone researcher to win this year's Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. Elizabeth Blackburn, a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Greider, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Jack Szostak, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, were noted for their roles in the discovery of and pioneering research on telomeres and telomerases. James Rothman, a cell biologist and chemist at Yale University, and Randy Schekman, a developmental cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, were chosen for their work on cellular membrane trafficking. Lastly, Seiji Ogawa, a neurobiologist from the Hamano Life Science Research Foundation in Tokyo, rounds out the list for his discoveries leading to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

For the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the company picked Michael Gratzel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology for his invention of dye-sensitized solar cells, now known as Gratzel cells, Benjamin List at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Germany for his development of organic asymmetric catalysis using enamines, and the research team Jacqueline Barton at the California Institute of Technology, Bernd Giese at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and Gary Schuster at the Georgia Institute of Technology for their pioneering research in electron charge transfer in DNA.

The winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be announced Monday, October 5 and the Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday, October 7.