Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amishi Jha


 * 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   delete. NW ( Talk ) 23:16, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Amishi Jha

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

This page is a BLP of a US academic who studies the neuroscience of meditation. The subject is a non-tenured assistant professor, whereas WP:ACADEMIC criterion 5 requires appointment as a full professor with tenure and generally a named chair. (I speculate that the subject may very well, in time, pass notability, but that is not a valid keep argument for now, per WP:CRYSTAL.) The page in its present form is sourced entirely to primary sources associated with the subject. The page discusses local university awards for teaching, initial primary publications, and research funding (including one publication commemorating funding from the US Dept. of Defense); we typically do not accept any of these as satisfying WP:ACADEMIC.

I have searched for independent secondary sources that might indicate notability per WP:GNG, independently of WP:ACADEMIC, when added to the page. I find two, and I think the decision here hinges on whether we decide that they are sufficient. The first&mdash;link&mdash;is a book titled Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher. It includes a short passage in which the subject is interviewed. The interview focuses on stressful events that occurred in the subject's life (which, for a non-academic layperson, would usually fall under WP:ONEVENT), and some of the subject's academic research, which is characterized as in its early stages, not as completed findings that are having any kind of impact. The second source&mdash;link&mdash;is an interview with National Public Radio. The transcript shows the subject talking with a Zen monk, and, like the book, describes the subject's research as early-stage: "She's still combing through her preliminary data...". WP:ACADEMIC note 14 states that "Criterion 7 may be satisfied, for example, if the person is frequently quoted in conventional media as an academic expert in a particular area. A small number of quotations, especially in local news media, is not unexpected for academics and so falls short of this mark." (I know from my own real life experiences in academia that university public relations departments routinely seek to place their faculty members on news reports.) It seems to me that the NPR interview falls short of establishing the subject as having, at this time, an influence that would establish notability for our purposes, even if she might well become notable in the future. It's a close call, but this seems to me to be less than the significant coverage required by GNG.

I have additional reasons for bringing this AfD, and for writing this unusually long nomination. There are currently efforts such as this to encourage academic scientists to participate in Wikipedia, and I anticipate that we will be seeing an increase in bio pages such as this one. (I note that all of the major edits to the page have been made from accounts that have only edited the page or made links from other pages to it.) Whatever we decide here, it will be useful to set a clear precedent have a clear understanding for the near future. If we accept pages like this one, there will be a motivation for them to proliferate: "I should be promoted to tenure because Wikipedia has an article about me." I fear that there would be a risk of COI. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:42, 6 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  —Tryptofish (talk) 23:42, 6 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Also listed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Neuroscience. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:56, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment Delete. GS gives h index = 11, in the bordline region. Article may be too early. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:52, 7 October 2009 (UTC).
 * Weak delete. The subject will probably meet WP:PROF criterion #1 (significant impact in scholarly discipline, broadly construed) in the near future, but not yet. While the h-index is only 11, the subject is a co-author on three pubs with citations above 100. However, only in one, the least cited of the three, is the author the first or last author.--Eric Yurken (talk) 02:04, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom and per Eric Yurken. Tone of article is way too promotional and we don't usually include info in such bios about some article being accepted in some journal (not even Nature or Science). Although this can be easily remedied by 5 min of editing, it seems evident that this article was created just a bit too early. --Crusio (talk) 02:48, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete. With all due respect, this is another poster-child-early-academic article. The subject might be notable sometime in the future, but is not yet. Specifically, most notable academics seem to satisfy WP:PROF on condition #1 – essentially, a body of research that has had notable impact on the field, usually as judged by number of research articles and number of times these have been cited. I'll point out that there's at least one other individual with a similar name in this same academic sector, so it's possible that some searches will give false positives. Since this is a "hard science" field, I think WoS may give the most accurate result. The following very specific search "Author=(jha a*) Refined by: Institutions=(UNIV PENN OR UNIV CALIF DAVIS) AND [excluding] Authors=(JHA, AK) Timespan=All Years. Databases=SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI" gives 13 journal publications (plus 10 abstracts) for an h-index of 7. Neuroscience is a fairly high-publication, high-citation specialty in the biomedical sciences, suggesting these statistics are not particularly impressive. Rather, I think they're very close to what you'd expect at the assistant professor level. The article also mentions grants and internal teaching awards, but here again these fall squarely into the "expectation" column rather than the "notable" column. The overall picture is very clear. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:50, 7 October 2009 (UTC).
 * Delete I would normally do an analysis of the publications, but Agricola's analysis is in my opinion perfectly correct and leaves me nothing further to add. But we do not need to set a precedent, for we have many precedents: almost always articles like this have been deleted. The only exceptions have been when the work has for some reason been [picked up by the media, often because the topic is of popular public appeal. And sometimes, of course, an Asst. Prof could be notable,  but almost by definition the level is specifically intended for people who have not yet shown notability. The questionable area is the typical Associate Professor. They have often not been kept, but some of us, including myself, would extend notability to such careers especially at the best universities--but there is no real body of opinion here for extending it this far. I would expect the Society for Neuroscience project   to have the sense to start at the top, where there are hundreds of missing articles.      DGG ( talk ) 04:51, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete: as noted, will likely become notable in the future, however, WP:CRYSTAL makes that moot at this stage. The edits primarily seem to be from single purpose accounts (or accounts very close to such a designation).   Vincent   Valentine  23:08, 13 October 2009 (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.