Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David R. Feinberg


 * 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 --Steve (Stephen)talk 09:57, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

David R. Feinberg

 * – (View AfD) (View log)

An unknown postdoc. Wait a few years/decades and try again... User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 06:37, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletions.   -- User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 06:42, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nominator. None of the publications seems to stand out yet. —David Eppstein 23:59, 9 June 2007 (UTC)


 * As you said, a little early, but just a little. He has a total of 13 papers, all in first-rate journals, and the top 5 have been cited 13, 13, 12, 11, 9 Even just these, since the oldest date to 2004, will have more citations in the next few years. DGG 00:07, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
 * You don't seem to be at all familiar with academic publications. There are many graduate students with dozens of papers and many faculty have published hundreds of papers.  That his papers have combined been cited a few dozen times is not even worth mentioning.  One high quality scientific paper may be cited hundreds (or sometimes even thousands) of times.--User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 02:15, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually,DGG, looking at your user page, you do know a great deal about academic publications, so I'm now at a total loss to understand your comments. He obviously doesn't come close to meeting Notability_(academics).  Almost every postdoc I know, particularly at schools like MIT and Harvard, seems equally if not far more noteworthy.  And I wouldn't create a page here for any of them either.  --141.154.243.201 02:49, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I left out the word Delete. but I thought it was clear that that was by !vote. I discuss further below, since we seem to running a mini-symposium on scientific notability, & I want my share of the floor :) DGG 04:45, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Each one of these papers has been sited more than double each journal's impact factor would predict, meaning that these papers are twice as important as the journals think they are. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.247.244.231 (talk • contribs)  — 140.247.244.231 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * First, your IP is from Harvard, which is where David Feinberg is located. Just in case you are or know him, I'll remind you of WP:NPOV and Autobiography.  Second, I am not here to make friends, and your comment sounds like some kind of threat.  I certainly hope not.  And finally, I am here to improve the quality of this encyclopedia.  Period.  --User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 21:48, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * No threats here, but I'm glad you know how to do an IP trace. Kudos Big Brother.  Just wondering why its your goal in life to take the article down.  If you search for David Feinberg on Google, the wikipedia article comes up on the first page.  So, there must be a fair number of people who access the article.  Its not the number of papers that should guide who goes on wikipedia in any case, its whether or not somebody thinks you are worth writing about, and somebody thought this person was worth writing about.  Don't let jealousy guide content on wikipedia.
 * First, there are a total of four web pages linking to the article: []. I think you don't understand how Google calculates page rankings.  (It has infinitely more to do with Wikipedia than it does with him.)  Second, the page is not notable.  He is just one of thousands of anonymous postdocs.  Sorry, I was one once too and know the feeling, but there is no reason to list them here.  Also, I suggest you read No personal attacks and Assume_good_faith.  --User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 22:57, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I just noticed that the above user deleted his comment, which I considered a threat. I'm replacing it here for the record. Threatening comments like this do not belong on Wikipedia.  --User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 23:18, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Delete Has the same number of first-author papers as I do and I am not notable. TimVickers 18:04, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Fails WP:BIO and is WP:NN in my book. --Evb-wiki 23:08, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Comment -- Are people taking into account differences between fields when judging whether the number of papers is significant or not? For instance, papers in Computer science tend to be much shorter and more incremental than in, say, Renaissance history--thus many more CS papers are needed to be notable than history papers (which tend to be single authored).  Where is psychology in this scheme?  I don't know.  But "same number of first-author papers as me" is not a relevant metric unless we take into account different fields.  -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 01:27, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I am qualified to evaluate his work. My opinion is amply represented on this page.  Have you read Notability_(academics)?  He is simply not notable at the moment.  --User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 02:04, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I didn't comment on your qualifications or the subjects notability, I commented on the practice in this AfD of editors comparing themselves to the subject of the article and concluding that the relative number of first authored papers is alone a reason to delete. Oh, and yes, I have read Notability (academics) -- in fact, I've made several contributions to it, used it to participate in several dozen academic related AfDs, and my name appears eight times on its talk page.  I'm,hoping I'm just misreading the implications of your statement, which I found condescending.  You have jumped on DGG with "You don't seem to be at all familiar with academic publications" and then assumed that someone posting from an address at Harvard was the author and read a threat where frankly, I don't see one, and then quoted "assume good faith" at him or her.  There are reasons to disagree with your views beyond being ignorant of guidelines and policies.  For one, people may well believe that an average Harvard post-doc surpasses the "average professor" test of WP:PROF.  (I argued at an AfD for a grad student a few weeks ago why we might hold people at the early stages of their careers to an even higher standard; I'll dig it up if anyone is interested) -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 03:34, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * You'll have to forgive my utter frustration with this discussion. As someone who regularly evaluates scientific CVs for potential grad students, post docs, grant reviews, etc., it is astonishing to me that anyone would think there is something notable here.  This is simply a case of embarrassing self-promotion in a self-authored article for a postdoc with no obviously notable publications.  (The notion that a Harvard postdoc is more notable than the "average" professor is quite amusing.  I'll have to mention that to my colleagues in the morning.)  I'm going to stop here before I get carried away in my response, as I think this much discussion on what to me is so obviously a non-issue has become ridiculous.--User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 03:51, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * By the way, I'm curious, how would you read his comment?: "Careful whose articles you delete, you will not make friends this way." The presumption an academic might make to such a comment is that if he knew who I was, he might try to damage my career, e.g., reject papers, proposals, etc., presuming he someday gets a faculty job.  It didn't seem a particularly veiled implication to me.  By the way, I also didn't assume it was the author.  Please reread what I actually wrote.  Finally, I suggest if you find me condescending, replying in kind may not be the most productive approach.  --User:RandomHumanoid(talk) 04:45, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * These are not notable journals, look up their Impact factors. Hormones and behavior - 0.3 Evolution and human behavior - 0.2 Animal Behavior - 0.3 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America - 0.1. In contrast I have multiple JBC papers (impact factor of 0.6) and one PNAS paper (impact factor of 10). I am not even close to being notable or important. TimVickers 18:22, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Exactly my point, from impact factor:
 * Misuse of impact factor: "The comparison of impact factors between different fields is invalid. Yet such comparisons have been widely used for the evaluation of not merely journals, but of scientists and of university departments. It is not possible to say, for example, that a department whose publications have an average IF below 2 is low-level. This would not make sense for Mechanical Engineering, where only two review journals attain such a value."
 * Microbiology could have might higher average IFs than Pyschology. All in all, I think the article is a delete, but I don't think that all of the reasons given for deletion are sound.  -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 18:52, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * PNAS publishes psychology articles, the best journals such as Science, Nature and PNAS publish across fields. TimVickers 20:05, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Delete. Subject doesn't meet notability guidelines. Fairly obvious self-promotion, since Dr. Feinberg started his article and his personal webpage links directly to the Wikipedia article. --Akhilleus (talk) 19:03, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Discussion There is indeed a tendency for people in a field to judge very few people in the same field to be notable--that is a useful bias on an appointments committee, but not here. And people at the same university may know their colleagues too well to think highly of them--it's as common as positive bias. Because it seemed obvious that the article would be deleted, I didn't try to improve it, as I and others sometimes do. He is now a post-doc, but the published work is that done as a graduate student. He's working in a very specialized niche, one in which I know citation counts are low. He is author or coauthor of 14 papers, not 4.-- he only listed 4. --That's not self-aggrandizement, it's modesty or stupidity.  Whoever wrote it listed only first-authored papers; I just now added to the article quickly without formatting them the most cited, some of which are in higher ranking journals--reasonably enough--although he was not the principal author.  And now I have a confession to make: I find his work interesting. But that's not supposed to count--I do not advocate keeping articles on the grounds of ILIKEIT, or unreasonably slant an article so it sounds much more important than it is -- so I didn't say keep, and merely said something nice as an aside, not intended to influence the decision--and it didn't. Most people seem to also say delete DGG 05:31, 15 June 2007 (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.