Gender Representation Among Nobel Prize Laureates

1. Introduction

The Nobel Prize is one of the most well-known awards in the world. It recognizes people for their achievements in science, literature, peace, and other fields.

For this assignment, I will use the Nobel Prize API to explore gender representation among Nobel laureates. My goal is to understand the differences between male and female laureates and see how female representation has changed over time.

I will focus on four research questions:

1. How many Nobel laureates are male and female?
2. How has the number of female Nobel laureates changed over time?
3. Which Nobel Prize category has the highest percentage of female laureates?
4. Which countries have produced the most female Nobel laureates based on birth country?

2. Planned Approach

I will use R to collect and analyze JSON data from the Nobel Prize API. First, I will use the jsonlite package to retrieve the data and load it into R. I will also use the tidyverse package to clean, filter, and organize the data. Next, I will analyze the data to answer my four research questions.

For the first question, I will count the number of male and female laureates and calculate their percentages. For the second question, I will use the award years to examine how the number of female laureates has changed over time. For the third question, I will calculate and compare the percentage of female laureates across Nobel Prize categories. For the fourth question, I will use birth country information to identify the countries with the highest number of female laureates. I will use the current birth country names provided by the Nobel Prize API. Finally, I will create bar charts and a line chart using ggplot2 to present my results.

3. Anticipated Challenges

One possible challenge will be extracting information from the JSON data. Some fields, such as birth country and Nobel Prize category, are stored inside other fields. Another challenge may be missing values. Some records may not include gender or birth country information. I will need to check these records and handle missing values before the analysis. Some laureates may have received more than one Nobel Prize. I will need to be careful not to count the same person more than once in each analysis.