A study was carried out to test Garfield's claim that citation counting can be used to predict Nobel prizewinners. Using a sample of 83 eminent chemists, it was found that receipt of the Nobel Prize is indeed correlated with citation counts, but that it is more strongly correlated with the number of papers co- authored in which the senior author's name is not the first in the list of authors. This result was tested out on the 1976 Nobel prizewinner, W. N. Lipscomb. It was found that a ranking by numbers of papers not first-authored predicted that Lipscomb would receive the Prize, whilst a ranking by citation counts would not have done so.