Wikipedia talk:Notability (academics)/Archive 15

Citation counts becoming less reliable as a marker of academic success

See a recent story in Science, [1], where Clarivate has removed all of mathematics from its listings of highly cited researchers because groups of lesser mathematicians have been found to be manipulating the citation counts by over-citing each others' work. In my own editing, I've been finding myself relying more and more instead on fellowships of major societies (#C3) as a way of identifying top researchers that is less susceptible to manipulation and to universities promoting themselves by giving names to all their faculty. But even there I've occasionally seen people with notable society fellow titles whose research looks like highly-cited junk to me.

I'm not convinced that it's time to ditch #C1 yet, but this is at least a sign that we need to be careful with it. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately that seems to be true. Anything that is used as a proxy for performance in such a way is subject to such gaming. There is a lot of truth in the old adage (I can't at the moment remember who it is attributed to) that if someone's pay depends on it that anything will be twisted. We do however, have to recognise that Americans (and English speakers in general) have for a long time tended to cite mainly other Americans (and etc.). It seems a little odd that this tendency has come to light only when the Chinese and others have behaved in the same way. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:43, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

Anything which makes academics subject to WP:GNG would be fine by me. SportingFlyer T·C 20:53, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

That would not be my preference. Then we would get notability based on whose university has the best hype machine, not an improvement. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:10, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

There has always been a problem with manipulation of citations. The remedy is careful study of each case and a background knowledge of citation culture and the field of study at hand. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:37, 31 January 2024 (UTC).

I still believe that if you're a professor who hasn't been written about in secondary sources, you're not a notable professor. Would make this consistent with the rest of the project as well. SportingFlyer T·C 08:19, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

You are reasoning circularly based on a fixed idea of how "notable" is defined for Wikipedia. It is not convincing as an argument for why such a definition should be appropriate for academics. And you know what they say about consistency. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:30, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

There's no good argument for why academics should be the exception to the rule, though. SportingFlyer T·C 09:46, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

The argument for any rule is: does it select as notable the topics we think should be selected as significant? Basing inclusion on hype rather than recognized scholarly accomplishments does not do that. Following a rule merely because it is a rule or merely because it is consistent misses the point. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:09, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

In many cases, a professor's work has been described substantially in secondary sources. See my essay. JoelleJay (talk) 20:58, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Then the article should be on the work instead of the person? I read the essay but still really don't see how this is any different from a cricketer who hasn't received SIGCOV. SportingFlyer T·C 22:28, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

No, not normally; the bio should still be the main article. But I'm not sure these are really the cases we are talking about here. Johnbod (talk) 22:33, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

If a footballer's performance in a specific match was discussed in detail years later, are you saying you wouldn't count that towards notability?

And what makes more sense, writing standalone pages on every research article that is described in substantial detail in other academic papers by independent authors, or deciding that a few dozen such descriptions--spread across multiple papers spanning several decades--where the work is attributed in prose to a particular researcher ought to be collected on one page on that researcher instead? JoelleJay (talk) 02:21, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

@Phil Bridger: Goodhart's law. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 02:26, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I've always wished Scopus would report how many articles by different people (and institutions) cited a given researcher, on top of the "total citations" and "total documents" parameters and the "remove self-citation" function. What would citation graphs look like if we only counted articles that had no N authors (or no senior authors) in common with any prior citation? I imagine the rate at which a researcher's citations approaches subfield saturation might be informative as to how broad an impact their scholarship has had. This wouldn't work with some fields, like consortia-heavy HEP or pure math, but I don't think the normal C1 citation counts are applicable to those anyway. JoelleJay (talk) 03:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

It would not be unheard of for fringe mathematicians to have citations from other names whose existence outside of those citations is difficult to verify. Names such as, for instance, L. Kuciuk of the University of New Mexico. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:37, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

FWIW MathSciNet does provide this information. 100.36.106.199 (talk) 02:33, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I've never found MathSciNet's citation counts to be very informative. They miss too much stuff. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:14, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I think the community has always been careful of citation counts (distinguishing citation counts per field). While citation counts may not the best metric to determine the notability of an academic, they way they are used by this community make a certain amount of sense. Generally junior researchers have low(er) citation counts, while senior researchers generally have high(er) citation counts. So, the metric does fit within our fuzzy understanding of notability across the project. I do not see harm to the project if an academic with lower citation counts ends up with a stand-alone page (assuming all the information is verifiable). - Enos733 (talk) 03:41, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree with both the discussion emphasis on caution with h-factor, while at the same time retaining them. To me an h-factor is more one of several bars that they should pass, I would be very reluctant to call someone notable just on that unless it was > 100. Unfortunately fellowships of major societies also have to be analyzed with some care to see if they are real achievement versus those given out when someone has paid their dues for some years. (Yes, the latter do exist.) In the end this is going to be the same as grading exams -- we will never get it 100% right, but with care probably 90% right and there is no better metric. Ldm1954 (talk) 05:23, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Just as @Enos733 was saying that "the community has always been careful of citation counts (distinguishing citation counts per field)" we have here another testament to the opposite happening. h>100 might not be too high a bar in multi-authored, high citation, short article fields, but it is more than an order of magnitude too high for single-authored, low citation, book-as-norm fields. In musicology, I know of exactly one author who has written 100 articles in her career. The second highest scholar H-indexes for various (non-computational) musicology subfields in Google Scholar are 7 for baroque music, 12 for medieval music, 7 for twentieth-century music, etc. -- why so low? For one, Google doesn't know how to extract citations properly from discursive footnote citation styles. How to fix this? No magic bullet, but second guessing the decisions of scholarly academies seems the wrong direction, not the right one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mscuthbert (talk • contribs) 20:12, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

My impression is that in fields where h>100 is not extremely rare (such as high energy physics) it is non-rare because of huge collaborations where everyone is listed as a coauthor on every paper. H-index is again not very useful in such circumstances, unless maybe it can be restricted to first-author papers. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:28, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think h-index or citation counts (at least how we normally approach them) are applicable to most humanities, book-heavy, or conference proceedings-focused fields in general. They're really only reasonable for fields where senior researchers publish 50+ articles and have multiple coauthors on each paper. JoelleJay (talk) 21:05, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Citation data are useful, but never definitive, when compared to peers within the same field. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:34, 4 February 2024 (UTC).

I 100% agree with @Xxanthippe, they are useful but one has to look for more. (N.B., my "100 citations" was only meant to indicate a big number, not more. Of course discipline weighted, and co-author weightings are relevant. Please note that not everyone with high citation numbers has multiple coauthors. One of my favorites is Mike Ashby ) Ldm1954 (talk) 03:53, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Sure, but if we didn't have #C1 he'd still be a shoe-in for an article. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:26, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

I only mention multiple coauthors because it's much easier to assess relative impact in a field when someone has 50+ (ideally 100+) coauthors whose Scopus citation profiles can be compared to theirs. Ashby has 226 coauthors, more than enough to gauge where he is in relation to the median and average total citations, h-index, paper count, and top five paper citations among the researchers with the most similar field specialization (this is the type of analysis I employ in select STEM academic AfDs). JoelleJay (talk) 06:54, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Even when normalized by subfield, aggregate statistics such as you describe can mislead for researchers who work in multiple subfields with significant differences in their citation patterns. A recent example: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Vivek Shende. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:11, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Yeah I generally avoid those (as I did with Shende). And when I come across a coauthor with a wildly different publication area from any of the other coauthors I censor them. JoelleJay (talk) 02:16, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

This will eventually solve itself when someone successfully applies the equivalent of PageRank to citations. Various attempts to create CiteRank have been made, and I'm not sure of the current state of affairs. Mathglot (talk) 05:59, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

(arbitrary break) Hi, I came here wanting to open a new thread exactly about the topic being discussed here. I see in many AfD discussions the argument "they have an h-index of 34, so they are notable", being used too often. I was reading just a couple of days ago a systematic review showing how the correlation between the h-index and the number of scientific awards, at least in physics, is now 0.00 (i.e.: no correlation whatsoever, the h-index is not an indicator of the impact on the field). Here's the full text for those who are interested: [2]. My suggestion: remove the highly cited requirement of C1, as the number of citations is no longer linked to the impact of the research output. There are other ways to verify if a person has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, by showing awards or mentions of their work in secondary sources, without the need to rely on the number of citations. It has been shown in a cross-discipline study ([3]) that "the more authors a paper has, the more probably it will be cited"; an author who had numerous minor contributions to collaborative work would be considered notable on Wikipedia, while they most likely aren't. Broc (talk) 14:23, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Good points. Unfortunately people will continue to "spin" h-factors no matter what we say here. I would strongly support somehow wording the criteria to say something like "high citations coupled with scholarly recognition in the wider community". What "high citations" means should be clearly spelt out as a relative metric in the main page, as should "scholarly recognition". Ldm1954 (talk) 15:03, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

I would support such rephrasing, and I would even go as far as explicitly stating that a large number of citations alone does not fulfill C1. Broc (talk) 15:09, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

The citation metric is not to show who should have a stand-alone article, but is a recognition that discussions of another person's work alludes to this phrase in WP:ANYBIO: "The person has made a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in a specific field." Again, as I mentioned earlier, and elsewhere, citation metrics generally favor senior academics, which makes sense. - Enos733 (talk) 16:48, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Note that there is a footnote to that sentence: Generally, a person who is "part of the enduring historical record" will have been written about, in depth, independently in multiple history books in that field, by historians. If that's the case, there should be plenty of sources available to show the notability of the academic in question, without having to rely solely on the number of citations they received. Too often are pages of academics just a copy of their resume from the university website, plus some passing mentions elsewhere. If it wasn't for C1, they would not be able to fulfill WP:GNG. Yet, according to C1, if they are "highly cited" they are presumed notable, even if no historian will ever write about them. Broc (talk) 10:39, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

We could stop acting as if we were an appointments committee and just take the results of real ones by saying that a professor or higher is notable and an associate professor or lower is not (at least under WP:PROF). That would bring us into line with many Wikipedias in other languages, and do away with many time-wasting arguments here. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:19, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

That won't work because of the wide variety of standards that exists. A post-doc at Harvard (at least before the recent fracas) would be more likely to pass WP:Prof than many a full professor at a mid-western Cow college. Xxanthippe (talk) 04:09, 1 March 2024 (UTC).

@Phil Bridger could you please make some examples of other language wikis that have such criterion? Broc (talk) 10:41, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

@Broc This will heavily depend on the field. HEP and other experimental physics, and subfields heavy with million-author consortia papers: citation counts are worthless, I agree. But in subfields with fewer authors per paper and fewer papers per person, citations can still be meaningful.

I've done a lot of analyses of Scopus metrics at AfD, and in many cases I think such data when compared to the metrics of the subject's senior-scientist-level coauthors can be informative as an exclusionary criterion--that is, the subject having a markedly less impressive citation profile than that of their median or average (post-postdoc) coauthor can be suitable evidence against academic notability when the other NPROF criteria are not met or are marginal.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

However, as evidence for academic notability I think more caution and holistic assessment is necessary unless the citation profile is significantly more impressive for the subject than their typical peers,[14][15] and even then we should be mindful of coauthor composition. Someone from a university not widely known to produce quality research, who only publishes with people in similar positions, and whose work is generally found in mid-level or lower journals, may have metrics well above those of their average coauthor but unremarkable when compared to the subfield in general.[16] JoelleJay (talk) 22:51, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

@JoelleJay I like the idea of a holistic approach but it would make it almost impossible for a general user (that is, someone who is not extremely familiar with "how citations work" in academia) to express their judgment as to whether a page of an academic is notable or not, if C1 would be the only applicable criterion. I find the approach quite valid though, and I wonder: if we were to use it, would there be a possibility to create a script that returns a comparison between the author and their co-authors? That would make the evaluation much simpler.

On a more general note however, the scientific community has not been able to agree yet on a universal, cross-discipline method to evaluate the quality of scientific output based on citation metrics, so I wonder why should Wikipedia try to do it? Why should we establish criteria that the academics themselves have not yet agreed on using? In my opinion, if C1 is the only argument towards notability, and no WP:SIGCOV can be found, the person should not be considered notable. If they really had an impact on the field, surely someone would be talking about them, regardless of how many or how few citations they received. Broc (talk) 10:18, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

More strongly the organizational bodies of some disciplines of academia have explicitly rejected citation metrics as an evaluation criterion. The one I know about is mathematics but I wouldn't be surprised if this is also true for some of the more humanities-leaning disciplines. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:12, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Then I really wonder if we should strike any mention of number of citations from C1. Broc (talk) 20:06, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Maybe at some time in the past they were meaningful, but no longer. Doug Weller talk 20:20, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I do use a python script sometimes to scrape out the relevant data, but I often have to go through manually reconstructing h-indices from split Scopus profiles anyway so generally I go in manually from the start. I should also mention that I only do these citation profiles for select subdisciplines (mostly biology, chemistry, medicine) and actively avoid anything related to HEP, math, conference-heavy fields, and most humanities for the reasons mentioned in this thread. And in the situations where my Scopus analyses demonstrate significantly higher metrics for the subject compared to their coauthors, I will look through the citations for lengthy passages describing their work specifically that could be used to write their biography research section (and might count towards GNG). JoelleJay (talk) 02:30, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

A propos of nothing, maybe: I was looking at Draft:Mahmoud Abdel-Aty, which was in mainspace; please see the history for how much worse it was. This person was the top 10 highest-cited person on the Clarivate list, and one of the highest-cited ones four years in a row. Google Books is insightful: plenty of citations, but text about him, not so much, if at all--the one thing I did find was just mundane. I think DGG said this, years ago: citations will not help us write an article, and if we have to write an article based on nothing but university faculty pages and (in this case) user-submitted resumes on conference webpages, then what are we writing. I cannot help but think that "citation" is a trick of some kind, some kind of circular mechanism, like a walled garden. I'll repeat what I said in an AfD earlier: in too many cases citations are merely dropped in to make it look like someone did a lot of research, when all they do is refbombing. In my experience, that's sociology and in some cases history--but I'll admit I haven't done a comprehensive study, and I certainly can't cite one. No, I'm all for changing/dropping/whatever. Drmies (talk) 02:45, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

He is an excellent example of why raw h-factors are not reliable. Please compare his h-factor to that of others in his area, Quantum Information. By comparison it is not high. This is why broader recognition is critical, as has been stated by many above. Ldm1954 (talk) 03:07, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Suggested modification of Criterion C1

1. The person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources. See also notes to Criterion 2, some of which apply to Criterion 1 as well.

1. The most typical way of satisfying Criterion 1 is to show that the academic has been an author of highly cited academic work – either several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates. Reviews of the person's work, published in selective academic publications, can be considered together with ordinary citations here. Differences in typical citation and publication rates and in publication conventions between different academic disciplines should be taken into account.
   • To count towards satisfying Criterion 1, citations need to occur in peer-reviewed scholarly publications such as journals or academic books.
   • In some disciplines there are review publications that review virtually all refereed publications in that discipline. For example, in mathematics, Mathematical Reviews, also known as MathSciNet, and Zentralblatt MATH fall into that category. The mere fact that an article or a book is reviewed in such a publication does not serve towards satisfying Criterion 1. However, the content of the review and any evaluative comments made there may be used for that purpose.
   • Generally, more experimental and applied subjects tend to have higher publication and citation rates than more theoretical ones. Publication and citation rates in humanities are generally lower than in sciences. Also, in sciences, most new original research is published in journals and conference proceedings whereas in humanities book publications tend to play a larger role (and are harder to count without access to offline libraries). The meaning of "substantial number of publications" and "high citation rates" is to be interpreted in line with the interpretations used by major research institutions in determining the qualifications for the awarding of tenure.
2. Criterion 1 can also be satisfied if the person has pioneered or developed a significant new concept, technique or idea, made a significant discovery or solved a major problem in their academic discipline. In this case it is necessary to explicitly demonstrate, by a substantial number of references to academic publications of researchers other than the person in question, that this contribution is indeed widely considered to be significant and is widely attributed to the person in question.
3. The publication of an anniversary or memorial journal volume or a Festschrift dedicated to a particular person is usually enough to satisfy Criterion 1, except in the case of publication in vanity, fringe, or non-selective journals or presses.
4. There are other considerations that may be used as contributing factors (usually not sufficient individually) towards satisfying Criterion 1: significant academic awards and honors (see below); service on editorial boards of scholarly publications; publications in especially prestigious and selective academic journals; publication of collected works; special conferences dedicated to honor academic achievements of a particular person; naming of academic awards or lecture series after a particular person; and others.
5. For the purposes of partially satisfying Criterion 1, significant academic awards and honors may include, for example: major academic awards (they would also automatically satisfy Criterion 2), highly selective fellowships (other than postdoctoral fellowships); invited lectures at meetings of national or international scholarly societies, where giving such an invited lecture is considered considerably more prestigious than giving an invited lecture at typical national and international conferences in that discipline; named lectures or named lecture series; awards by notable academic and scholarly societies; honorary degrees; and others. Ordinary colloquia and seminar talks and invited lectures at scholarly conferences, standard research grants, named post-doctoral fellowships, visiting appointments, or internal university awards are insufficient for this purpose.
6. For the purposes of satisfying Criterion 1, the academic discipline of the person in question needs to be sufficiently broadly construed. Major disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, history, political science, or their significant subdisciplines (e.g., particle physics, algebraic geometry, medieval history, fluid mechanics, cancer genetics are valid examples). Overly narrow and highly specialized categories should be avoided. Arguing that someone is an expert in an extremely narrow area of study is, in and of itself, not necessarily sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1, except for the actual leaders in those subjects.
7. Simply having authored a large number of published academic works is not considered sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1.
8. Having an object (asteroid, process, manuscript, etc.) named after the subject is not in itself indicative of satisfying Criterion 1.
9. Having a small collaboration distance from a famous or notable academic (e.g., having a small Erdős number) is not, in and of itself, indicative of satisfying Criterion 1.
10. Citation metrics alone (e.g., number of citation, h-index) are not sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1, but can be used in combination with other criteria to establish notability.

What do we think? Broc (talk) 21:55, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

i think in "j" it is better to have "Criterion 1, but should be used,..." Add parts of what was "a", enduring that it is clear it is not enough.

(N.B., you could also just edit "a" to indicate that it is not enough as a minimum change alternative.) Ldm1954 (talk) 22:15, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

That is a valuable suggestion and I agree to it, thanks. I might create an updated version based on the results of this discussion. Broc (talk) 09:00, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I am not sure there is a problem that needs solving around criteria 1, unlike clarification that may be needed for deans, vice-presidents, vice-chancellors, etc. Criteria 1 really only is applicable to edge cases when a stand-along article is created. This addition makes discussions at AfD more difficult for all participants as there will be a less-agreed upon metric to evaluate whether a subject should have a stand-alone article. - Enos733 (talk) 01:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Oppose this change without some counterbalancing change. This would severely gut our academic notability standards, which currently generally run at the level of full professor at a research university usually passing, assistant professor even at top universities usually not passing. The rest of the criteria are all calibrated to significantly more advanced levels of academia than that. In practice, #C1a is used for the vast majority of academic notability cases. It is problematic, as the above discussion indicates, but making this change and then applying it could well lead to the deletion of a large majority of our articles on academics. If we want to decimate our coverage of academics, and leave Wikipedia biographies to sportsballers and celebrities, that should be a deliberate decision, based on an actual analysis of how many biographies of academics we think we should have (and analysis of whether being excessively selective might amplify the biases in our coverage), not merely the side effect of reading a paper by some experimental physicists noticing that bibliometrics don't work very well in experimental physics. If, as I think was intended, we merely want to tweak our criteria to handle the issue that bibliometrics don't work well in some specific fields, then we should tweak them, not knock over the main support beam with a sledgehammer. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:03, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

@David Eppstein I completely understand your concerns, but I see it in a different way: if, as you mention, many pages of academics uniquely fulfill C1a and no other NACADEMIC criterion, nor GNG, those pages will most likely look like a copy of the subject's resume, given no other sources will be available (no awards, no honors, no appointments to editorial boards, no fellowships, no coverage in the press...), and please remember that WP:NOTRESUME.

I am uniquely concerned that pages who are uniquely sourced on resumes are kept at AfD because of a very debatable interpretation of C1. Such AfD discussions usually are focused on whether the number of citations is enough, or whether an h-index of 32 is high for a specific field, while the real matter we should be discussing is: is there sufficient material on this person to write a decent encyclopedia page?

To address more directly your argument: a vast majority of academics that fulfills C1a also fulfills other C1x and additional NACADEMIC criteria. This change would uniquely affect discussions on whether an academic is notable or WP:MILL that are uniquely based on the number of citations. Citation metrics can and should be used together with the other sub-criteria to verify C1 (hence my addition of paragraph j), but simply not by themselves. Broc (talk) 08:59, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

If there are a 1000 citations to a person's work, then that is 1000 available sources we can use for an article about them (and their work). The core logic of WP:PROF is that sources about a scholar's work can be considered together with sources about other aspects of their life. It's not saying that high citations are a indicator of notability in lieu of sources, it's saying that those citations are the sources.

That a lot of academic biographies merely summarise the subject's CV is a different problem altogether. I think it happens because it's usually quite easy to write an "Education and career" section based on primary sources (preferably not a literal CV, but institutional profiles, author blurbs, speaker biographies, etc.) and much more difficult to trawl through hundreds or thousands of citing papers to come up with a summary of their work based on secondary sources. So even though the latter is the more significant and notable element of the biography, it often gets left out. But this isn't a problem of notability; the solution is to expand the article, not delete it. – Joe (talk) 09:50, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I think the discussion is having a bit of scope creep. We are not debating what WP:PROF is nor whether academics should be subjected to WP:GNG as was suggested as some point above (and I don't believe they should). What we are debating is C1, which says an academic is likely notable if the person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed.

What I am trying to say with my proposal is that citation metrics (number of citations, h-index, cross-comparison with h-index of coauthors or even coauthors of the coauthors, or whatever other method) are not a valid cross-discipline approach, and I honestly don't even know if they are valid for any discipline at all.

They might be an indication of the research output of a scholar, but they say absolutely nothing about the impact on the field of research. The reason for this is that as soon as a metric is established, people will try to improve that metric by artificially conflating their citations. Hence we should not rely on citation metrics as the only way to establish notability.

Ironically, this was the subject of an xkcd comic two days ago. Broc (talk) 15:46, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I disagree. I think this discussion strikes to the core of how WP:PROF should be interpreted and ultimately, which academics should have a stand-alone page under WP:NBIO.

One thing that should also be considered is the relationship between NPROF and WP:NAUTHOR. While it is helpful if SNGs are logically consistent, the way the community has interpreted NAUTHOR is that several book reviews is sufficient to meet the expectations for a stand-alone page. This is even if the reviews provide scant information about the author's personal life, I bring this up since citations perform a very similar function for this community - reviews of the work (but are treated differently in the sense that it takes a lot more citations to get an academic over the bar). - Enos733 (talk) 17:00, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

It is possible to interpret C1a, and the fact that it takes many citations to get over the bar, as an extra barrier to entry for academics, a way to make it harder for them to get in rather than easier. If instead we evaluated academics purely by the principle that multiple in-depth independent sources about them or their work are sufficient, then essentially every published mathematician would be notable, by virtue of having in-depth reviews of their papers at zbMATH and MathSciNet (see, for instance, recently closed as redirect Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kevin Houston (mathematician) and in-depth coverage of his papers at sources like [17] [18] [19]; MathSciNet is similar but subscription-only). Similarly, for WP:AUTHOR we generally require multiple books to be reviewed (see for instance ongoing AfD Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Philip Pilkington) whereas even one book with multiple reviews would pass the criterion of having multiple in-depth sources about the subject's contributions. We don't generally raise the argument that this sort of coverage meets GNG, because PROF and AUTHOR impose stronger standards on what sort of sourcing on academic publications is needed for notability, but if C1a were eliminated it would open the door to this kind of argument instead. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:46, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

I would say in most STEM fields the vast majority of (independent) citations someone has are going to be non-substantive refs (don't describe the paper cited but just mention a finding in passing) and/or describe work the subject was coauthor on but not a major contributor to. But the chances that several citations actually do discuss the subject's research in depth and attribute it to them as a major contributor will increase the more they are cited, the more seniority they have, and of course the more impactful their results are. JoelleJay (talk) 22:56, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Seconding this comment by David Eppstein. -- asilvering (talk) 18:35, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Oppose this change on the grounds that it makes the guideline less clear, not more. To the extent that there is a problem with C1, what we ought to do is codify the hands-on experience developed at AfD: citation profiles are more meaningful in some fields than others, comparisons with coauthors are illuminating, etc. I agree with the comment above about the fundamental logic: If there are a 1000 citations to a person's work, then that is 1000 available sources we can use for an article about them (and their work). Moreover, I also agree with the comment, That a lot of academic biographies merely summarise the subject's CV is a different problem altogether. That's an issue of how to write an article, not whether or not the article should exist in the first place. (WP:RESUME says that Wikipedia is not a place to host your own website, blog, wiki, résumé, or cloud. But when a biography focuses on a person's career, a summary of a CV is a legitimate place to start. And de-CV-izing a bio that reads too much like LinkedIn is typically rather straightforward: the first and most important step is highlighting a lot of text and pressing DEL.)

The existing system, as it operates in practice, is not broken. It runs into edge cases, but it doesn't fill the encyclopedia with junk. XOR'easter (talk) 21:06, 28 February 2024 (UTC)

Oppose this change. I think David Eppstein, XOR'easter and Xxanthippe (below) have said it all. Qflib (talk) 20:11, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose the suggestion. The citation landscape has changed much in the last ten years. The reason is first that more papers are being cited because network aids like databases and citation managers like EndNote make it easier to place larger numbers of citations in a paper, and publishers seem happy to accommodate this. Some authors make citations to not very relevant papers to demonstrate their erudition and hope that their backs get scratched in return. The second reason is that much more gaming of citations is taking place, often at an institutional level. The impression I get is that some private biomed research bodies require any paper published by it to cite every paper ever published by it before in order to build up its citation record. The fact that the interpretation of citation data can be complex and subtle does not mean that citation data should be abandoned as being too difficult for Wikipedia editors to cope with. As with any topic in Wikipedia the more background knowledge of a topic that editors have the more useful their edits are likely to be. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:55, 1 March 2024 (UTC).

  @Xxanthippe I understand the objection. Would you be in favor of adding a note of caution to 1a, explaining exactly what you just mentioned in your comment, how citation metrics can be easily manipulated and need to be examined in their context, and that their interpretation can be complex? Broc (talk) 11:16, 1 March 2024 (UTC)

There are already plenty of provisos in WP:Prof#C1. More would overburden it with instruction creep. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:38, 1 March 2024 (UTC).

I'm suprisingly neutral on this change and could even be supportive of it if balancing language were added (such as removing the number of times the word "significant" appears in criteria "b"; or adding that citations of a work (especially those with discussion of its significance) are in themselves independent sources that convey notability. Where C1a has helped a lot of scientists and other researchers in high-/easily-extracted citation counts, the emphasis of it as the first subpoint of the first criterion has encouraged a lot of drive-by "h-index of 11: delete" votes for people who don't know about differences between fields (writing 11 solo-authored books is very different than having a name on 11-team-authored conference proceedings, etc.). It doesn't look like this change is heading towards consensus (in part because of this community's justifibly learned behavior to look at most proposals to change the guideline as attempts to make profs pass AfD for the same reasons as celebrities), but I want to give the encouragement for good-faith tweaks in the future. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 00:30, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Question

Criterion 6 notes that The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society. Wondering what exactly defines a "major academic institution". Would, e.g., the historical presidents of the University of Delaware qualify? What about Delaware State University? Goldey-Beacom College? Wesley College? Just wondering. Thanks, BeanieFan11 (talk) 23:51, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

This has been the subject of unresolved discussion in the past. My recollection, or perhaps just my personal opinion, is that it's such a vague word that it's useless. In the U.S. context, I think it would be appropriate to interpret it as "accredited." Using that criterion, all four of those institutions would qualify. (In the interests of transparency, I work at one of those institutions and have colleagues at some of the other institutions.) ElKevbo (talk) 00:41, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

General consensus is that community colleges are not major in this sense, but they are accredited. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:49, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

The president of Kaplan University, a private/for-profit and regionally accredited school was deleted (see AFD:Betty Vandenbosch). — Preceding unsigned comment added by TJMSmith (talk • contribs) 04:15, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

I feel like the institution being accredited is just one aspect - a baseline. Awarding at least a bachelor's degree is a second baseline.

Looking beyond those things, I suggest that an institution might be considered "major" on the basis of whether the institution is either

(a) historically important (school is more than 50 years old, lets say, and therefore has many alumni, or is the first school to do a certain important thing like provide coeducation, and so forth)

(b) highly selective (this is assessed by the US government, I believe)

(c) produces funded research at the graduate level, eiher directly or through institutional collaborations, or

(d) something else I haven't thought of yet.

On the other hand, size is not the point at all. After all the largest community colleges in the US have up to 175,000 students (https://www.campusexplorer.com/student-resources/biggest-community-colleges/.) They are extremely important to society, but are not focused on the creation of knowledge (although of course there may be important exceptions out there that I don't know about!). In that sense, they may not be notable enough to automatically confer notability to their presidents. Along those lines, being the president of Kaplan University (which no longer even exists), may not confer notability and I therefore tend to agree with the deletion. Qflib (talk) 19:58, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we should also do a little more fleshing out of what "major" means for schools outside of Anglophone and western European countries. If our expectations for C6 (and C5 for that matter) are that the president has a solid academic background and is likely to have met the more global-impact-calibrated NPROF criteria like C1, C2/3 (international), or C8, I would argue against any relativistic interpretations of "selectivity" and "quality research" in determining what a major school is. The most selective or research-intensive university in Liechtenstein may or may not be comparable in those metrics to schools in, say, Germany or France. And just like we wouldn't consider someone who is highly cited solely through and by work in low-tier, non-selectively-indexed or "bad" journals to meet C1, we shouldn't consider a university whose primary research output is via such journals to be "major" either. On the other hand, C6 might also predict significant impact in more localized areas that may deserve recognition, e.g. through C4 or C7 or even GNG, and these might be the criteria to look for when assessing an institution in regions that don't routinely generate internationally-acknowledged research results. JoelleJay (talk) 20:26, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Good points. Qflib (talk) 20:36, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

After having given this some thought, I wonder if we might consider rewording C6 slightly so that it is in better alignment with C5. Currentlly, 5 and 6 are as follows:

5. The person has held a named chair appointment or distinguished professor appointment at a major institution of higher education and research, or an equivalent position in countries where named chairs are uncommon.

6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution or major academic society.

What if we changed 6 to read

6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution of higher education and research, or a major academic society.

Qflib (talk) 20:18, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Does it have to be of both higher education and research? For instance, maybe the head of a major national laboratory such as Sandia or Inria should be considered to pass? (It appears we currently do not have articles for James S. Peery and Bruno Sportisse, but maybe we should.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:43, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Excellent point. Let me try again:

6. The person has held a highest-level elected or appointed administrative post at a major academic institution of higher education and research, a major research laboratoryinstitution, or a major academic society.

Qflib (talk) 20:46, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that "research or artistic" should probably be there. Presidents of major conservatories (which are not generally thought of as research institutions) have generally been found notable. I'm fine with this change, but we've rarely not come quickly to a consensus in individual AfDs of presidents/provosts/etc. about what counts as major or not, even if we can't put it perfectly into words here. C6 has generally been a time-saving criterion. I'm trying to remember a case where someone's notability was investigated thoroughly but in the end only passed because she or he passed C6. -- Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (talk) 00:37, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we have to recognize that the United States is the outlier here. In much of the world the word "university" (or its translation) is protected, and only major institutions of learning can use it. Only in the US could the Hamburger University exist under that name. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:46, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure about that. Is Università telematica San Raffaele a major institution of learning? Dr. C.V. Raman University, Bihar? Pharos University in Alexandria? —David Eppstein (talk) 22:12, 5 March 2024 (UTC)