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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lewis Leavitt

:The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. 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.

The result was no consensus.  Sandstein  20:24, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

=[[Lewis Leavitt]]=

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

Non-notable academic. No sources. This article appears to be part of personal series of articles about related family members; See Judith Walzer Leavitt and David I. Leavitt. Bryan Hopping T 02:58, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

  • Delete per nom. Fails WP:N and WP:V. There are no sources what-so-ever to prove existence, let alone notability. ~Beano~ (talk) (contribs) 03:05, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

:I don't have an opinion regarding his notability yet, but certainly his publications listed in the article are enough to prove his existence. They are publications in peer-reviewed medical journals, certainly perfectly fine sources in terms of WP:V. Nsk92 (talk) 04:53, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

::Can you give a quick idea how good an index of 20 is? How long did it take to acquire those 900 citations? - Mgm|(talk) 10:26, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

::Many of those citations are probably to his wife, Judith Walzer Leavitt, who seems to be a very prolific scholar.--Eric Yurken (talk) 12:43, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

:::That's not likely - WoS allows for the search involving first and middle initials, and already their first initials are different. Nsk92 (talk) 13:32, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

::::Indeed, I searched for "Leavitt LA" and as far as I can see, none of the citations are for Judith. I have looked also at some of the publications that I earlier excluded, and they seem to be for this particular LA Leavitt, too. That leads to over 1100 citations and an h of 21, the three most cited articles have 128, 91, and 86 hits. The earliest publications are from 1975, there may be older ones, but my WoS access does not go farther back than 1975. I agree with Mgm that length of career is an issue here, even though notability is something cumulative, not a question of the mean. An h of less than 1 point per year is indeed less impressive, so I have changed my "keep" vote to "weak keep". --Crusio (talk) 14:08, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

  • DeleteComment. He is close to meeting the academic/professor notability criterion #1 (significant impact in their scholarly discipline), but not quite. I did a search on a few databases for refereed articles written by him. There were quite a few in the area of mother-child communication, and some were well-cited; this helps with criterion #1. However, in none of them he is the first author; he is usually the last, which in his field usually indicates that he obtained funding for the project. He seems to be a successful manager of researchers - in essence, and administrator who gets co-authorship by being an administrator.--Eric Yurken (talk) 17:49, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

:*You must be kidding.... Being last author is what every researcher in this field strives for. It emphatically does NOT mean that he "just obtained the funding" (in itself already a scientific accomplishment in the current funding climate). The last author generally is the one who conceived of the project, designed the experiment(s), and wrote the article. Not for nothing is the last author generally called the "senior author". --Crusio (talk) 18:35, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

::*Yes, without comment on the AfD itself, the last author is the "senior" author. While they may have provided funding, they have also generally played a major role in the conception and execution of the study. Next to the first author, the last author is the most meaningful spot in the list. MastCell Talk 18:59, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

:There is a lot published on the topic of authorship order in his field out there. The following quote, which I got from [http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/7_15_98/jpv71032.htm here], is a bit old but clear and representative: "...those who had been head chairperson for less than 10 years increased their number of articles, last author articles, and coauthors per article over time. This finding suggests that a change in hierarchical status influences authorship patterns. Senior scientists are under great pressure to publish: a number of British departments insist that supervisors are included as author on their students' papers. This practice might lead to gift authorship: granting of authorship to those who did not make any intellectual effort for the study." I do not know how someone can avoid this though, so I am changing my delete vote to a comment.--Eric Yurken (talk) 20:29, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

  • Delete per nom. JFW | T@lk 19:01, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:04, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep Anyone with top papers that get near 100 ISI citations, even in biomedicine where citation rates are typically very high, is being widely cited, which is equivalent to notability. Much much more than the average scientist, for the most common number of citations a paper gets is 1. That sort of citation is how scientists become notable--their work is used as an authority in the field by hundreds of other people. In biomedicine, some principal authors insist on keeping their name at the 1st position, but most put it at the end. And the way to more specifically tell who the principal author is is to see whom the money was granted to--grants go to notable scientists who have proven their notability to their peers on a national basis. The junior not yet really notable people may have fellowships, the senior notable ones are the ones with the grants. This researcher is a full professor of Pediatrics at UW medical school. The department there can be safely assumed to know what its doing when it makes such appointments--appointments invariably made after multiple peer reviews, from inside and outside the school. They can certainly be considered to be a better judge of notability than we at Wikipedia. It's funny in a way for people here to think they can better tell--the profession establishes the notability, we just record it. Considering they are in different subjects, we see, as we would expect, that he and his wife have no joint publications: he works in child psychiatrist, she in history of obstetrics. Why should anyone thing the notability of either depends on the other? As for h: h values is notoriously unaffected by having good papers: if one has published 100 papers with 20 citations each, the h is 20; if one has published 90 with 20 citations each, and 10 with 200 citations each, the h value is again 20. If a paper had 2000, the h value would still be 20. Mediocre scientists may be characterised by a lot of mediocre publications; notable ones have some important papers.-- just like him. DGG (talk) 04:42, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete Unsourced BLP. RMHED (talk) 17:55, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep Per DGG and Crusio (who can be a tough grader), and who are better equipped to evaluate. I added three external links that back up most of the article, [http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/~leavitt/ Lewis Leavitt, Waisman Center],

[http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/bbtad/faculty.html BBTAD Postdoctoral Training Program Faculty] and

[http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/bbtad/pdf/leavitt_biosketch.pdf Lewis Leavitt, Biographical Sketch from BBTAD], to allay verifiability concerns. John Z (talk) 01:16, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

  • Keep DGG's argument is compelling. Dlohcierekim 03:29, 2 November 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep, per DGG and his selection as one of the two editors of [http://www.baby.com/viewdocument.aspx?did=537 this review], which indicates prominence in the field of Pediatrics. Tim Vickers (talk) 18:19, 4 November 2008 (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.