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, defaults to KeepNakon 04:15, 23 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Unlike many of the other people on the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions, this person is a real scientist heading his own group. The question is really to what extent Wikipedia should be a(n autobiographical) Who's who of the world's scientists, and what level of notability is required for inclusion. Wikipedia:Notability (academics) seems to imply lower requirements than does Wikipedia:Notability (people), and I think it should be kept in mind that things like publications in peer-reviewed journals are a basic part of every scientist's job. --Vegetatron (talk) 20:45, 16 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Keep It should be a comprehensive encyclopedia containing all notable scientists, --that the people involved may have written the article here is reason for care and careful scrutiny, but not for deletion. The holder of a named chair in a major UK research university, who is effectively head of a department, is certainly going to be notable. All college faculty write papers, yes, and the average is between one and two. In most universities, 6 or so is necessary for tenure. He has written 27 in Web of Science, of which the most cited, The systems biology markup language (SBML): a medium for representation and exchange of biochemical network models in BIOINFORMATICS 19 (4): 524-531 MAR 1 2003 has been cited 237 times. (the next are 98, 59 and 51 Very few scientists get to that point--especially those with a large part of their career in industry, where there are fewer publications than the academic part of science. More notable than most, which is the standard here. "all scientists write papers" is like saying that all baseball players hit balls. There are the major leagues, and full professor at Glasgow is at that level. DGG (talk) 17:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. Maybe some clarification of the notability guidelines for academics would be of help, especially to make it clear what it takes for a PI to be more notable than the rest. I estimate that there are at least 100k research groups in the world, and 100k articles about individual scientists seems at least an order of magnitude too many. (On a side note, I'm not familiar with the numbers you cite for the typical number of publications -- where I'm coming from you need at least 2-3 (and preferably more) peer reviewed papers to get a PhD, and you'll have at least several times that by the time you're heading your own group. It could be that we're in very different fields.) DGG, I also took the liberty of removing a line break in your comment, just to keep it all on the same indentation level. Vegetatron (talk) 09:55, 18 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: I agree with Vegetatron. Two papers is just enough to get a PhD in the life sciences. Anybody with just 6 publications would have a hard time even to be considered for an assistant professorship, let alone get tenured. Perhaps it's different in other fields or at smaller US colleges or universities in some developing countries, but not at major US universities or any university that I know of in Western Europe. --Crusio (talk) 12:26, 18 January 2008 (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.
