Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kevin J. Sullivan

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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 keep. Spartaz Humbug! 03:48, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Kevin J. Sullivan[edit]

Kevin J. Sullivan (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log) • Afd statistics
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lack of notability per WP:ACADEMIC

Comment He has a few articles in Google Scholar which are cited by ~180. Does it qualify for significant impact in WP:ACADEMIC? Ipsign (talk) 05:44, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I added a few things to the article. I thought this was interesting, though I did not add it: In a 2007 article in "Communications of the ACM" [1] which ranked computer scholars nationally, he was ranked #24. However, I did not add this to his article since the only full text of the article I could access was from his university homepage. It appears to be an actual copy of the article, but I don't know if articles sourced to the person's homepage qualify as "independent" - even if they were originally published by an independent source. He also holds an endowed fellowship at the university, but that is not the same thing as an endowed professorship (which would be automatically notable). --MelanieN (talk) 01:06, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This is an academic field often very difficult to judge, because recognition as an expert is sometimes not done in the formal ways other fields of study use. But for him, Scopus shows 53 published papers (including published conference proceedings, which is the field of computer science count equally). The highest citations are 103 ,99 ,66 , 53 which is very good in any of the engineering sciences, and enough to establish him as an expert in his subject. DGG ( talk ) 04:14, 4 November 2010 (UTC) .[reply]
As I understand, being an expert is not necessarily enough to satisfy WP:ACADEMIC (see note 5 on WP:ACADEMIC). My feeling is that if everybody with 50 articles would be listed in Wikipedia, it will equal to listing at least half of all the professors in the world (especially older ones), which is probably not an idea of Wikipedia, so sheer number of articles shouldn't count much. I certainly agree that citation count of 100 is worth something, but is it enough for inclusion to Wikipedia for the field of computer science? Let's take a look at citation metrics for those computer scientists who're certainly notable (I will use numbers from Google Scholar, but for CS it still should be rather relevant, I think picture in Scopus will be similar): universally recognized Bjarne Stroustrup's book citation number is 7000+, but even much less commonly known Douglas C. Schmidt has a book cited by 4300 and articles cited by 700+. While comparing to them is not per se an argument of non-notability, still IMHO it means that citation count of 180 doesn't look that good for computer science, does it? Ipsign (talk) 05:23, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Interestingly, the paper which ranks Sullivan #24 is a paper entitled "Automatic and Versatile Publications Ranking for Research Institutions and Scholars" which might be useful for future AfD discussions. Abductive (reasoning) 05:04, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree that findings of this article can be considered authoritative for two reasons: first, it is based on publications (which are already took into account by Scopus etc.); second, rankings within the article has been provided only as examples of applying methodology described in the article (to prove it is viable), and particular table is based only on 2 journals + 2 conferences, which IMHO cannot be considered really representative for the purposes of notability. Ipsign (talk) 06:55, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for making that clear. Abductive (reasoning) 07:19, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. There is a concurrent AfD on Bruce Eckel, which is IMHO substantially more notable (one of the books has 900+ citations per Google Scholar, etc.). IMHO if Kevin J. Sullivan stays, Bruce Eckel should stay too to ensure consistent application of notability criteria. Ipsign (talk) 06:38, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep h-index is 24. I believe we have a rough consensus that any author/academic with h-index > 10 meets #1 for WP:PROF. By that count Sullivan qualifies easily. (disclaimer: came here through a notice left in my talk page by Ipsign, who had noticed i had commented in the Bruce Eckel page and invited me to comment)--Sodabottle (talk) 05:07, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Comment. The h-index for unanimous consensus that an academic is notable is considerably higher than 10. Check through previous AfDs to find other regular participants' numbers. Some don't like using the h-index at all. Abductive (reasoning) 06:14, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks; I will withdraw my nomination based on this finding. Ipsign (talk) 05:24, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Withdrawing nomination. Discussion here and especially findings of Sodabottle convinced me that the article should be kept (though any help rewriting it will be greatly appreciated - it is a mess). Ipsign (talk) 05:27, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment on h-index. There's apparently a name coincidence with someone from another field. It seems unlikely the same person wrote articles on computer science and also medicine, such as Low exhaled nitric oxide and a polymorphism in the NOS I gene is associated with acute chest syndrome. This results in an inflated h-index for both. I don't think there's a way to separate them as long as Google Scholar is used as basis for the calculation. Tijfo098 (talk) 06:50, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment See also comment by Crusio here: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bruce Eckel. As I understand, he says that h-index is highly dependent on the field, and that h-index 10 as such is often not enough to satisfy WP:ACADEMIC; combined with name clash with somebody from another field (see comment by Tijfo098 above) it might easily mean that Kevin J. Sullivan is not really notable. Ipsign (talk) 06:53, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
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.
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