Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Barbara Ramsay Shaw


 * 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. WP:PROF can be a bit confusing if one is unfamiliar with the means we use to assess academic notability, but the consensus here is very clear. Xymmax So let it be written   So let it be done  22:36, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Barbara Ramsay Shaw

 * ( [ delete] ) – (View AfD) (View log)

Fails WP:PROF. Criterion 5, being a Distinguished Professor was inappropriately cited as a reason to deprod, since half of all professors at Duke are (also inappropriately) called Distinguished, as Wikipedia's own article states. Regular Google Scholar/Book/News searching doesn't turn up enough to justify an article. Joey the Mango (talk) 20:38, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete: This is another of those "who cares" articles. What makes her diferent from the thousands of other professors in the US alone? Niteshift36 (talk) 22:30, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 22:37, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep as Distinguished Professor, named chair. Top GS cites 314, 147, 141 .. The up to "half of all" in this article refers to Harvard Business School, not Duke, and I see no evidence that that Duke calls that large a proportion "distinguished."  In any case, Duke (and HBS) are first rate universities. Someone judged more prominent than the average Duke or Harvard BS professor would usually be thought to be quite notable in their field - the "who" that cares is the consensus here to accept such consenses among a professor's knowledgeable peers as proof of notability.John Z (talk) 23:21, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Article makes no real claim of notability, who cares about prestige? Prestige isn't notability, and notability is not inherited from the institution. This sounds like pure elitism. Joey the Mango (talk) 00:08, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. Google Scholar gives h index of 25, good for an early career researcher. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:27, 31 May 2009 (UTC).
 * As one can see in this older version of Wikipedia's article on the h-index, 25 isn't very high, and there are professors with much higher h-indices who don't have articles. Again, what can you point out about this person that is notable? No secondary sources are provided. WP:PROF was designed to keep articles about professors off of Wikipedia, not as a justification for keeping articles on Wikipedia. Joey the Mango (talk) 00:08, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That h-index is large enough for WP notability, even in the discipline of physics. In non-science fields, that h-index would be very large, since many journals would be excluded. For example, one of the most heavily cited researchers in the field of management, with over 2,000 Google Scholar citations to a single article, among others, has an h-index of 6. Also, in some specialized and citation-sparse fields, that h-index would be extremely high. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eric Yurken (talk • contribs) 14:45, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I completely agree that the h index, like other bibliometric measures, is only one factor to be used with care in assessing impact of scholarship. The reservations associated with it are discussed in the article. I quote from the article h index "Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 10-12 might be a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences." Xxanthippe (talk) 00:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC).
 * My concern is that people argue using WP:PROF as a substitute for notability. Notability is a lower bound beneath which an article should not exist. WP:PROF is intended to be a higher lower bound than notability. I believe that Dr Shaw falls below the notability threshold, so it doesn't matter that she meets one of the criterion of WP:PROF. Joey the Mango (talk) 03:04, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Could you provide evidence of that interpretation? It says:
 * "it is possible for an academic not to be notable under the provisions of this guideline but to be notable in some other way under one of the other subject specific notability guidelines. Conversely, if an academic is notable under this guideline, his or her possible failure to meet other subject specific notability guidelines is irrelevant."
 * Hobit (talk) 12:32, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep and expand. It's hard to imagine anyone non-notable getting an appointment at this level at a major university  Surely, this can be rescued. - Vartanza (talk) 05:28, 1 June 2009 (UTC).
 * The burden of proof falls on those who argue to keep; do you have any secondary sources that demonstrate notability? Because I can imagine someone non-notable getting an appointment at this level at a major university. Joey the Mango (talk) 06:30, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * No such thing as a burden of proof on Wikipedia. It's a collaborative project, and we should all try to determine whether including this article improved Wikipedia or not. You seem to have checked enough before you nominated, so I don't mean to criticize you in general. --Apoc2400 (talk) 22:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cr050009p makes her appear notable. We need sources though. Hobit (talk) 13:10, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * That is a primary scientific article for which she happens to be an author. How does that make her appear notable? Joey the Mango (talk) 22:56, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. This is a slam-dunk on WP:PROF criterion #1, as any minimal checking would have found. Some journal pubs from Web of Science: Biochem. (1990) 201 citations, Pharma. Res. (2002) 137 citations, Toxicol. & Appl. Pharmacol. (1982) 129 citations, Biochem. Pharma. (2000) 114 citations, and the list goes on. Given her very notable publication record, her position, etc., it is likely she meets other criteria too, but these would just be incidental and not necessary to check for the discussion here. Glaringly notable. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 19:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC).
 * Incredible that WP:PROF is being abused in this way. Joey the Mango (talk) 22:56, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * In what way? Please explain. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:03, 1 June 2009 (UTC).
 * One of my edits got lost somehow; it said: How does having some citations--admittedly good for her career--prove that "[t]he person's research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources"? Joey the Mango (talk) 23:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * In other words, no secondary source says "Dr Shaw has made significant impact to the understanding of X". A list of citations is nice, but it is original research to infer that she has "made significant impact". Joey the Mango (talk) 23:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The way that the system of academic research works, and particularly in the field of this LP, is by incremental advances on established knowledge. The convention universally followed in the research community is that the authors of a paper cite the previous work of relevance that has led up to their own work. Accordingly, each cite is evidence of impact on the scholarly discipline. If a paper has a lot of cites this amounts to significant impact. If a paper gets no cites then it is less likely to have made much impact. There are problems of assessing the individual contributions from papers with multiple authorship and this has to be judged by the accumulation of evidence. Of course there are other measures of impact such as distinguished appointments, patents, prizes etc. These are discussed at length in WP:PROF. The above is a sketch of the system and there are many subtleties. However, I hope it helps a bit. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:50, 2 June 2009 (UTC).
 * So no significant impact, then? Joey the Mango (talk) 01:12, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Your edits for this case suggest that you do not really understand the vetting process by which hard-science scholarship at research universities is judged, and by extension, the well-established precedents which are used here to evaluate articles with respect to WP:PROF. You obviously don't accept Xxanthippe's very clear (in my opinion) explanation, so please allow me to take a crack at it. The simple fact of the matter is this. When researcher A uses results/ideas/methods/observations/etc of researcher B (i.e. "builds upon the work of B", "B has influenced the new work of A" – however you might want to think about it), that fact typically manifests itself as a citation to B's paper. The citation count is the most realistic indicator of the impact of B's work. Admittedly not perfect, it sometimes under-represents the impact, because A might use B's results without citing (which can lead to priority disputes). Within academic circles, this person's research record (oodles of papers with >100 citations each) is considered quite impressive – most researchers do not reach such a level. And, with respect to WP:V, these citations are the independent sources. Indeed, we do not need someone to look at these for us and then proclaim "ah, she is notable and has an impact on her field", as you seem to want. This would be fine, but is entirely unnecessary. So, yes, her work has had a very conspicuous impact on her field – no ambiguity at all here. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 10:02, 2 June 2009 (UTC).


 * Delete. WP:PROF sets a high bar, and she hasn't met it.  Just having a certain number of hits in Google scholar of a few journal publications isn't enough - it has to be shown, through reliable independent sources, that the academic's "research has made significant impact in their scholarly discipline," and I don't see even any assertion of that, let alone proof.  (I do realise that that is only one of several possible criteria listed at WP:PROF, it's just that it seems to be the only one that might apply.) Dawn Bard (talk) 23:34, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Please see my immediately preceding post. Your flippant assertion of "a few journal publications" is off the mark here and suggests you are willfully looking past the actual significance of this person's research record. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 10:02, 2 June 2009 (UTC).


 * Keep. As noted by John Z, meets WP:PROF criterion #5 (named chair or distinguished professor appointment). Very likely meets other criteria as well.--Eric Yurken (talk) 01:45, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. Despite the nominator's refusal to accept this, she clearly passes WP:PROF #1 and #5, either one of which would be enough. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:49, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. I'll second that. WP:PROF is a guideline agreed by consensus. The nominator, or anyone else who disagrees with it, should discuss the matter at its talk page rather than claim that it shouldn't apply to one article when it has been accepted by numerous Afd discussions to be a guideline for inclusion. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:48, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It's a guideline for disclusion; it cannot override the policy of notability for inclusion. I note that of the keep notvoters have addressed this. Joey the Mango (talk) 22:54, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Er, no... have you tried actually reading WP:PROF? Where do you get the idea that it's for "disclusion"(sic) (I think you mean "exclusion")? The first sentence under the heading "criteria" says, "if an academic/professor meets any one of the following conditions, as substantiated through reliable sources, they are notable", and then criterion 5 says, "the person holds or has held a named/personal chair appointment or "Distinguished Professor" appointment at a major institution of higher education and research". The only possible room for doubt is whether you consider Duke University to be "a major institution of higher education and research". Do you seriously dispute that? And where do you get the idea that notability is a policy, rather than a guideline? Phil Bridger (talk) 00:47, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * My understanding of the reason WP:PROF was created was to increase the difficulty of having articles on professors on Wikipedia above and beyond WP:N. I was not aware that WP:N was not a guideline; I'm sure that is political, since it functions as a policy. I am not saying that WP:PROF is wrong to list Distinguished Professordom as evidence, I'm saying that this professor, in spite of her title, has not actually done anything notable, as evidenced by the lack of any secondary sourcing which could tell us what that might be. Would you support someone going through university websites and creating a directory-like article on Wikipedia for every Distinguished Professor found in every "major institution"? Joey the Mango (talk) 01:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * There are over 300 secondary sources listed in a Google scholar search that say what she has done in her most well-cited paper, and nearly 150 secondary sources for her second most-cited paper. It's in that sense that WP:PROF is more strict than WP:BIO or WP:N: nearly every published academic will have multiple reliable third parties citing them, but we require much larger numbers of citations than the "multiple sources" required by WP:N to satisfy criterion #1 of WP:PROF, or we require other types of reliable sources for the other criteria. It's in that sense that WP:PROF is stronger than WP:BIO, and despite being a more stringent test it is clear that Shaw passes it. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:35, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I see; you are saying that being cited is notability. Are any of these in review papers? That would count as secondary sources. Joey the Mango (talk) 03:07, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, some of them are, but I don't think that's such an important distinction the better question is: how many of these other papers say something nontrivial about her work, as opposed to a trivial mention among a list of other prior research? I don't know. A little searching found, for instance, 10.1016/0027-5107(95)00104-2, which has a whole ten-line paragraph specifically about her work: "Barbara Ramsay Shaw, in addressing the mutation of DNA in vitro, tested the hypothesis that a cytosine which is mispaired (or is a neighbor of a mispaired base or is situated in a distorted helix) thus may be protonated and thereby deaminate more frequently than a normal cytosine in normal DNA. Her experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, thereby giving a reasonable solution to this apparent violation of the rule of independence of formation of individual mutational lesions." That's enough to count as nontrivial in my eyes. But most of the hundreds of citations are going to be trivial, so finding the nontrivial ones is difficult without spending a lot of time and effort (and access to a university library) reading all the references; citation counting gives us an acceptably accurate way of avoiding all that work in deletion discussions, allowing us to spend the rest of our Wikipedia-editing time in more constructive pursuits. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:41, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * If her article was more than two sentences long I might be inclined to agree with "citation counting gives us an acceptably accurate way of avoiding all that work..." Many of her papers are about boranophosphates (that article was written by a User:Doclaura who only made that one edit). The word "boranophosphate" itself has an h-index of 21. So I remain unconvinced that my nomination was or is misguided. Dr Shaw got her PhD in 1973, so a body of work with a certain amount of citations is to be expected, but the deafening silence about her impact, as could be demonstrated by review articles saying what the impact of her work was, is disturbing. The link you provide is to an article titled "The 4th International Conference on Mechanisms of Antimutagenesis and Anticarcinogenesis: A summary", which doesn't seem legit at all. Do you at least see my point? Joey the Mango (talk) 08:38, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * "The word 'boranophosphate' itself has an h-index of 21." What do you mean by this? How did you arrive at the number 21? Xxanthippe (talk) 09:27, 3 June 2009 (UTC).
 * From the h-index article: “… a scholar with an index of h has published h papers each of which has been cited by others at least h times”. Given this definition, to say that a word has an h-index makes no sense.--Eric Yurken (talk) 14:37, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe it does, it proceeds by the same line of reasoning; the penetration of the topic into the literature. Joey the Mango (talk) 18:44, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Something I like to do in this sort of AfD when I can get a specific idea of the subject's expertise is to search for that keyword and see how highly the subject's papers rank. Joey's h-index calculation for boranophosphates shows that they're clearly notable (the subject of some 1650 papers in Google scholar) despite the badness of our article on the subject. But the Google scholar search for boranophosphates returns Shaw's papers as its top five hits. So clearly, she is the top expert in an important subject. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:14, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment. Based on collective edits of the nominator in this case, what seems clear is the following: (1) With all due respect, nom is entirely ignorant of academic conventions and standards, especially as they apply to WP:PROF under whose criteria this article is being evaluated. In particular, s/he seems incapable of accepting/understanding that (a) Prof. Shaw's research has had a glaringly obvious impact on her field, as evidenced by numerous highly-cited papers, (b) academic governing bodies, even at the highest-ranking institutions, accept precisely this sort of evidence as proof of the notability of one's scholarship, in fact it is essentially the necessary and sufficient condition in the hard sciences (in which the subject works), (c) they do not consider any sort of outside validation to be necessary for judging scholarship impact/notability, e.g. mention in the popular media, in review papers, in non-technical publications, in news or trade magazines, or anything else the nom might claim is necessary, (d) WP has a long, established history of reasoning the notability of professor-type articles along these same lines because there does not appear to be a more objective way of doing so, and (e) there's no reason to insist we should now adopt a wildly different standard for this article alone. (2) This discussion is ripe with WP:IDHT, suggesting WP:NPOV concerns. I'm afraid that further engaging the nom in any sort of debate will be a waste of time (e.g. we now have to demonstrate that the H-index is not defined for "words", see Eric Yurken's entry above), but you are of course free to do so. (3) As to the merits of the article itself, multiple commentators here have already demonstrated satisfaction of at least criteria #1 and #5 in WP:PROF. Again, feel free to discuss further, but understand that at this point, you're no longer trying to convince the closing moderator. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC).
 * Comment. I endorse the above comments of Agricola44. They should be applied also to other articles this editor has attempted to delete. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:58, 3 June 2009 (UTC).


 * My nomination was in good faith. What I wanted was a debate, not a automatic, numerically-based invocation of the h-index and WP:PROF. David Eppstein was the only one here to engage in such a debate, and for that I am grateful. (Heck, I was the one who went to the trouble of figuring one what she actually worked on, not any of the people here or on the article.) I am familiar with conventions in academia, including a very important one; somebody who got her PhD 36 years ago, and has been on the faculty since the late 70s/early80s, judging from the listings on her lab alumni page, might have been promoted to Distingished Prof as a matter of course. Joey the Mango (talk) 18:44, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. I don't think anyone here said your nomination was in bad faith. But the notability facts on this person came rolling-in fast and furious – there are some cases that are just very clear-cut. You may not wish to judge merits on the basis of "numbers", but they were overwhelming here. Again, this doesn't reflect badly on you for nominating. As David Eppstein mentioned above, we all feel like there's much WP work to be done, and so we all like to dispose of the "easy" cases quickly. As to your point, I wouldn't say "promoted to Distingished Prof as a matter of course" is the right way to frame this, as it implies that she merely received some sort of "service award". In actuality, these are somewhat special appointments, given usually only to full professors, as special recognition of outstanding scholarship, valuable administration work, etc. – often the underlying (though un-publicized) factor in these appointments is that they serve as incentives to keep the very best profs (most productive, most prolific, etc) right where they're at. It is certainly true that most full professors do not get the "distinguished" title. So, I think it's probably most accurate in this case to presume she was promoted to Distinguished prof because of her notable scholarship. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 19:55, 3 June 2009 (UTC).
 * Comment I agree, it is unlikely that the named chair/ DP is just for time served. I don't think "the reason WP:PROF was created was to increase the difficulty of having articles on professors on Wikipedia above and beyond WP:N." is a good description of practice. The specialized notability guidelines are rather more often than not used to include rather than exclude. WP:N is vague enough that whatever evidence people come up with for passing WP:PROF can be considered as the substantial coverage needed to pass WP:N.John Z (talk) 20:06, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you both for your considered responses. I feel better now, and more confident that the AfD system is functioning properly, and will reach the correct conclusion(s). Joey the Mango (talk) 21:07, 3 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep all full professors at Duke probably do count as notable. Many of them count as distinguished by any criterion. We judge notability of researchers by the impact of their research, and that is judged by citations. She very clearly qualifies. I'm glad we have the opportunity to educate our editors in the way the academic world works, and we should not blame them for their initial lack of knowledge about the standards of the major research universities. Looking numerically, citation counts such as shown here are always a sure indication of notability, as a  definitive and objective way of showing influence on the subject  DGG (talk) 04:04, 4 June 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.