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Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Samuel Sears

: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. v/r - TP 14:27, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

=[[Samuel Sears]]=

:{{la|Samuel Sears}} – (View AfDView log)

:({{Find sources|Samuel Sears}})

Even before I removed the resume from this article, there were no secondary or even tertiary sources establishing this person's notability, and I have not been able to find any. Drmies (talk) 04:53, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Behavioural science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:10, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

:Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:11, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

  • Weak Delete. It looked like a non-notable psychologist to me until I noticed tucked away in the info bar that he won the "Psychology Award (1998) Awarded by the Florida Psychological Association". Does anyone know if that is a significant honour? If so, that might sway me from weak delete to weak keep. --Legis (talk - contribs) 01:02, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
  • Weak keep. The article as it was before the nominator and a previous editor committed major surgery on it was clearly over-promotional. However, a quick glance through GScholar seems to give the subject an h-index of about 28, which in most fields would be taken as fairly strong evidence of meeting WP:PROF#1. Though (particularly seeing the amount of multiple authorship in the subject's publications) I am willing to be told I am wrong. PWilkinson (talk) 15:53, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
  • I wish I were smart or interested enough to learn about those indices (and figure out my own). I'll ask someone more knowledgeable than myself to weigh in. Thanks PWilkinson, Drmies (talk) 18:06, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Unless you have a very common name (such as many Chinese or Korean names or someone called Smith or Jansen), it's fairly easy if you have access to Web of Science: search for your publications and in the upper right hand corner you'll see a link "create citation report" and it will calculate your h automatically... :-) Scopus will also do it, but if you have publications that were published before 1996 it will underestimate your impact. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:37, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Thanks. Next question (I'm not done with you yet!)--is this subject's h-index decent enough for notability? Thanks, Drmies (talk) 18:38, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Neutral. To me, this is a borderline case. GScholar often gives inflated citation rates and it is the same here. Web of Science gives an h-index of 17, which in a high-citation area like this is not exceptional and many more junior researchers will have a similar -or higher- index (the h-index tends to get higher as one's career advances). The highest citation counts are 269, 123, 82, but on the first paper he is just one of many authors (placed somewhere in the middle). The award does not really seem notable to me, there are many state-level associations and they all have awards. It would be differently if this were on the national level. I don't see any evidence that any one of the other criteria of WP:PROF are being met, either (named professorship, editor of a major journal, etc). --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:48, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Thanks Guillaume. Now back to work--syllabus for me, red wine for you, no doubt. Drmies (talk) 19:10, 5 January 2012 (UTC)
  • Actually a wodka martini (stirred, not shaken...) with a lemon twist. Finished a few grant applications today (which evil bastard dreams up a Jan. 5 deadline...), so I felt like celebrating... Will be even more so if they actually decide to fork over the dough... :-) --Guillaume2303 (talk) 21:55, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

::It's not that GS gives inflated counts, GS gives between 1.5 and 2 times the WoS count because it includes a wider range of citing material. Which one is the better in a given area varies, but in any h values are meaningful only obtained in the same way and when compared with other people in the same field. I notice anb increasing tendency here to use them as absolute indications of notability. To know whether a citation record is significant, one has to at least look at the citing references and see where they're from, and in some cases, what the reputation of their author or even their actual content is. And when we do use citation records ourselves, we need to take into account the presences of extremely high counts as indicating notability regardless of the h index., which cannot tell someone with 20 papers with 20 citations form someone with 10 papers of 100 citations and 10 papers with 20. parer with 20. DGG ( talk ) 05:30, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

  • Weak Keep In this case, I notice that there is in fact one paper with 185 GS citations, published in a goof BMJ spin-off journal, [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1767118/], and one with 154 cites in a decent specialty journal. [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/clc.4960220709/abstract] They are reviews, and reviews are often cited, but I consider being qualified to write 2 such widely used reviews is an indication of notability, though nothing else much in the record is all that convincing--the prize is only state-wide, and consequently minor. I need to point out that Guillaume and I do not actually disagree on this one--the difference between neutral and weak keep is quite narrow. DGG ( talk ) 05:30, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

:*Yes, DGG and I don't really differ in our appraisal of this article. I admit that part of the fact that GScholar gives higher counts is because it includes more sources (contrary to WoS or even Scopus, GScholar tries to be all-inclusive). However, I do maintain that it routinely overcounts. Not only is there the case of Ike Antkare, but I also base this judgment on what I have seen for citation counts to my own papers, where I have seen, for example, a commentary that nobody has ever cited turn up several dozens of hits. GScholar is a nice first approach (if you don't find anything there, you won't find it elsewhere either), but for more exact counting, you need WoS. Of course, DGG is absolutely correct with his remarks on how citations should be interpreted (wish the beancounters would be so enlightened here), so exact counts are not that essential here anyway. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 08:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

:Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

:Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Bryce (talk | contribs) 14:31, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

:Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

:Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Bryce (talk | contribs) 02:32, 15 January 2012 (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.