Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adrienne Dixson

:{{la|Adrienne Dixson}} ([{{fullurl:Adrienne Dixson|wpReason={{urlencode: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adrienne Dixson}}&action=delete}} delete]) – (View AfD)(View log)

:({{find sources|Adrienne Dixson}})

Non-notable assistant professor, single digit h-index. Deprodded. Two comments questioning notability already on talk page. Abductive (reasoning) 17:16, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

• Delete. Non-notable minor academic. Hairhorn (talk) 19:42, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. —John Z (talk) 05:33, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Comment That there are 2 comments on the talk page (one of them the sole edit of this editor) seems hardly relevant. --Crusio (talk) 05:40, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Really? I think it means that these users chanced upon the page and felt motivated enough to ask why it was encyclopedic, but lacked the know-how or motivation to nominate it for deletion themselves. Often articles that shouldn't be on Wikipedia will garner such comments before finally being chanced upon by the likes of me. Abductive (reasoning) 09:04, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Delete. GS gives cites of 55, 55, 22, 10, 9, 8... h = 6 as above. Too low for WP:Prof #1. Not surprising for Assistant Professor. May acheive notability later but has not yet. Xxanthippe (talk) 06:36, 7 August 2009 (UTC).
• Delete Although the presence of a negative comment by what obviously is a SPA makes me feel that perhaps there is something fishy here, I can't find any other indications of notability. Web of Science, which often gives much higher citation and h counts in this cases gives even lower ones than GS (6, 5, and 4, for an h of 3). --Crusio (talk) 10:04, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Maybe the spa knows her in real life, and knows that this is a vanity article? Or maybe the spa is a regular editor who wanted to suggest that the article be deleted but didn't want to be the one to be seen pulling the trigger? Abductive (reasoning) 10:11, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Exactly, and then hiding behind a SPA. My definition of "fishy" or "unsavory"... --Crusio (talk) 10:17, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Yeah, true. Perhaps they were afraid to be in the open because of the nature of Dixson's work. Abductive (reasoning) 10:32, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Most likely was a student of her's - I wouldn't read anything more into it. --ThaddeusB (talk) 16:43, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Delete. Confirm Crusio's WoS findings: 5 articles with h=3. This is archetypical of a young, early-in-career (and usually promising) academic who has not yet been in a field long enough to make notable contributions, i.e. they don't pass WP:PROF #1 (and are thus usually even farther from clearing any of the other criteria under WP:PROF). There's a long paper-trail of these sorts of AfD "deletes", a few recent ones being Juliet Davis, Beau Baez, Allison Christians, E. Figueroa, C. Moreau, Mary Healy, and, well, you get the idea. Often these articles are created by WP:SPA – this one seems to be a person who only edited mainly on this article and one other briefly in 2007. With all due respect, Crusio's comparison between WoS and GS is incorrect. It is WoS that invariably gives lower article counts and citation rates, because it lists only publications in archival journals and citations only from such journals. Though I think both GS and WoS are important to examine in each case, I lean more to WoS because it easily filters out "puff pieces" that are not legitimate publications in the conventional academic sense, flushes-out instances of false claims of authorship, etc. For example, the recent Juliet Davis AfD was a case where these factors proved to be important. The relevant point is pasted-in here:

::"A person's CV publication list will often be puffed up with entries that will be perceived by most casual observers to be bona fide peer-reviewed publications in mainstream academic journals. Of course, the problem is that there are quite literally tens of thousands of such journals across all academic specialties, making it enormously difficult for any single commentator in this forum to always discern the WP:PUFF. A WoS search will often help: articles in the CV that are not in WoS are immediately suspect, prompting one to check further. I concede that not everything of academic value is in WoS, but we routinely find that absence in WoS correctly pegs a "journal" as something much much less, e.g. as in the case of [http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/digest/ Rhizome Digest] here. For the numerous true academic journals that actually exist, there are vastly more impostors. Furthermore, and unfortunately so, academics (in the very broad sense of the term) are often not shy about employing puff to elevate their status – this tends to find its way, sometimes intentionally, into a WP article. Puff can extend even to what is essentially subtly faked authorship, which WoS will also reveal. I believe all these aspects make WoS a useful assessment tool for all cases where the claimed notability rests at least partially on "journal publication", humanities or otherwise."

:Apologies for a long-winded (longer than usual) point. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:49, 7 August 2009 (UTC).

::::I completely disagree with the quoted paragraph as a general statement, and I doubt many information scientists or research librarians or scholars in the humanities would agree either. WoS includes only a very select list of current journals in the humanities, and similarly Scopus--exactly because of the many possible journals--so many not because they are insignificant but because they are most of them very small in contrast to science journals. Even in the social sciences coverage varies, and education gets very minor coverage in WoS, and only a little better in Scopus. Indeed, that's true even the the sciences: it is perfectly true that in molecular biology and physics a journal not in ISI is unlikely to be important, this is not the least true in descriptive biology. As a recent paper, by a well known information scientist, Howard White et al, in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the best journal in my subject, "Libcitation: A measure for comparative assessment of book publications in the humanities and social sciences" doi 10.1002/asi.21045 (v. 60, no.6,pp.1083-1096, 2009) says in its introduction

::::::Thomson's Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index fail to cover many journals in book-oriented fields. Particularly likely not to be covered , because of economic constraints on Thomson or any similar publisher, are journals from the smaller anglophone countries of in languages other than English. ...[and ]Scopus is of no help to people in the humanities.

::::The purpose of the authors is to propose counting the no. of books in libraries as an alternative measure--something I have long advocated here and for which am glad to have such authoritative support. I'll be discussing the article further, as I think it's of general relevance to how we evaluate in these fields.DGG (talk) 00:41, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

:::::WoS is very poor in its coverage of conference proceedings published as books, even in the hard sciences. GS is better at that but contains more dross. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:47, 10 August 2009 (UTC).

:::::::That's because WoS sells it as a separate product, Conference Proceedings Citation Index, and you have to buy it as an add-on. Scopus includes them in the main database. DGG (talk) 01:28, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

::::::::I have had access to the WoS Conference Proceedings Citation Index and have found it to be far from fully comphrehensive. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:19, 10 August 2009 (UTC).

• Delete - I dePRODed this, but I don't know what I was thinking at the time. Subject's citations are pretty low (below what I would normally consider "significant") and I am seeing nothing else to establish notability. --ThaddeusB (talk) 16:41, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
• Delete. Per nom, Crusio, and the thorough (as usual) analysis by Agricola44. Passes neither WP:PROF nor WP:BIO. Article created too early.--Eric Yurken (talk) 01:55, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

• Weak Delete Not yet notable. Analyzing it myself, (1) The book is only co-edited by her , and she wrote only 3 out of the 14 essays it contains [http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/62766047&referer=brief_results]. It is however found in over 200 Worldcat libraries, and published by a good, but not top-notch publisher. (2) Educational Research and Urban Education and Qualitative Inquiry all of them major journals found in hundreds of libraries. Even by Agricola's standard they are notable journals for they are indeed in WoS -- the Social Science Citation Index part-- (and Scopus & every index in the field of education or sociology.) Listing them is not in the least puffery, and I can not figure out how Agricola thinks they are. (3) The article Race, Ethnicity, and Education paper is reprinted from her book & should not be counted as two publications, but the cites can be added. (4) Agricola, not Crusio has it right about the relationship between WoS and GS counts--the normal ratio is about 2:1 in science and the "hard" social sciences because GS includes a very wide range of non-journal citing material--it's higher here because of the nature of the subject. (5) One edited collection and 4 or 5 articles is not normally enough publication for notability unless the publications are very exceptional, and these counts--whether using WoS or GS are not high enough to indicate that. (6) Assistant Professors typically are not yet notable unless they've done something exceptional, and she has not yet done so. --- so looking at it in our various ways we more or less agree, DGG (talk) 04:33, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

:*Clarification. I pasted-in the quote regarding puffery as relevant to the comments on GS/WoS and certainly did not mean that her refereed publications (which I listed in the first sentence in my entry) were tantamount to WP:PUFF. I accept them at face value as legitimate precisely because they are listed in WoS. (Whether they are collectively sufficient for the subject's notability is, of course, a different issue.) For the record, I wholly agree with the spirit of the above comments, which I hope I am acceptably summarizing as follows: (1) There are many legitimate and accepted venues for the dissemination of academic scholarship, including books, proceedings, and refereed journals, and there are perhaps tens of thousands of instances of each of these (though certainly much more even for books). The prestige of the different venues is not the same in all fields, but books and journals are almost always top-tier. (2) There are many more venues that are not considered to be legitimate scholarly outlets by the academic establishment, almost always including self-published or vanity-published books, web newsletters or blogs, unpublished or otherwise unrefereed technical reports and papers, internally published corporate memos and papers, e-mail bulletins, and on and on. (3) There can be a tendency on the part of some interested parties to use puffery to try to advance their prestige, standing, etc. (4) Separating notable from non-notable individuals for listing in WP is an important job and AfD commentators should be duly diligent in this regard. (5) Identifying WP:PUFF is sometimes a part of this process and it can range from being trivial to quite difficult, depending upon the case. (5) There are many tools to help here, including WorldCat, GS, Scopus, and WoS, and the most complete and accurate picture of a subject is painted by many eyes checking many sources and hammering-out a consensus via healthy debate on a case-by-case basis.

::My main point above regarding WP:PUFF, which I stand by, is that WoS will often correctly raise a "warning flag" that a specific claim of publication should be checked into more thoroughly. Journal publication is an important cog, though not the only one, in most academic fields, including the humanities. Moreover, journals do indeed strive to earn and maintain WoS coverage, precisely because it bolsters their own claims of legitimacy and notability. While I concede I'm not an expert on the broad humanities literature, I only have to look in WoS for my favorite poet [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/548 Mary Jo Bang] "Author=(bang mj)" to find a great example of the kinds of humanities journals and the extent to which they are covered by WoS – 45 publications in Paris Review, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, etc. I appreciate DGGs point that there may be many journals not (maybe "yet") covered, but neither is the number covered all that small. I'm afraid that, absent experts in all academic sectors who could weigh-in with informed opinion in each and every case, we're stuck with what we have – which I think is really not too bad! Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 17:47, 10 August 2009 (UTC).

:*Comment DGG is correct that GS usually gives counts that are high or too high. My above comment was probably a bit biased by the recent case when I checked a colleague (not for WP but for "real" life purposes:-): searching for "author:J Doe" (real name immaterial here) gave over 200 publications, although this person has published only about 110 (including book chapters). WoS gave 134 (some meeting abstracts were included in both counts). The h-index came out as 17, but is according to WoS 28. The five most cited articles according to GS have counts of 146, 134, 117, 79, and 74. According to WoS this is 160, 130, 130, 106, 103. So in this particular case GS is way off, in counts of articles, h, and numbers of citations... For analyses like this, I never use GS because it is unreliable. (I have articles myself that get huge citation counts in GS although I know fully well that they have hardly been cited at all). GS can be very valuable, though, too uncover sources for an article. --Crusio (talk) 09:39, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

:The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.