Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eugene Plotkin (mathematician)


 * 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. Consensus here is that the subject's publication record (and, more specifically, how often those publications are cited) is insufficent for WP:N and WP:PROF. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:21, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Eugene Plotkin (mathematician)

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The article was de-prodded, so I am bringing it to AfD. I don't believe that the subject passes WP:PROF. There are no significant academic awards/prizes, no journal editorships or editorships of books or special volumes, no named professorship/named chair positions, no elected scholarly society memberships/fellowships, no named lectures or other highly prestigious talks, and no publications in highly selective/prestigious mathematical journals (such as Annals, Inventiones, Acta, JAMS, Duke or something close to that). The only plausible grounds for passing WP:PROF here is based on citability. GScholar. gives h-index of 15, with top citation hits of 129, 71, 37, 36, 36. That's not bad for pure mathematics bit not sufficiently strong in the absence of other indicators of passing WP:PROF. Moreover, in math GScholar significantly overcounts the citation numbers because it counts citations in arXiv preprints as well as citations in published versions of those preprints. E.g. MathSciNet gives Plotkin a total of 367 citations with h-index of 12, and with top citations of 55, 31, 27, 20, 19. For his top-cited paper (on Chevalley groups), Web of Science returns 35 citations, and Scopus returns 66 citations. I did look up Plotkin's CV at his webpage. There is one curious item there. Among the conference talks for 1990 he lists "International Mathematical Congress, Kyoto, Japan". At first I thought that this meant the 1990 International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto. If Plotkin gave an invited talk there, that would definitely have made him notable, the citation data notwithstanding. However, he did not. I checked the IMU page with the list of all the ICM speakers for all the years. There only one Plotkin listed there, namely Gordon Plotkin who gave a talk at the 1983 ICM in Warsaw. It is most likely that Eugene Plotkin gave a talk in one of the satellite conferences organized in conjunction with the 1990 Kyoto ICM (those talks are just regular conference talks and don't carry any special prestige like the ICM talks do), but in any case he did not give a talk at the 1990 Tokyo ICM. All in all, he is an active and well respected research mathematician, but I don't see enough here to show passing WP:PROF. Nsk92 (talk) 03:08, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. Nsk92 (talk) 03:12, 18 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. Thanks for doing the citation research in the detailed nomination. However, I think that the MathSciNet h-index of 12 just scrapes through in a low cited field. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:35, 18 August 2017 (UTC).
 * Keep as the listed publications in significant publications are an inclincation to consider significance indeed for WP:PROF. Although it's a fact we like the easy cases such as honorary professorships or similar, the publications alone can be considered sufficient. SwisterTwister   talk  04:22, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Err, what do you mean? Which of the listed publication venues do you consider to be particularly significant? Among the publications listed, the journals where they appeared are quite ordinary or low ranked in math. E.g. from the 310 math journals listed in JCR with an impact factor, Journal of Algebra is ranked 168; International Journal of Algebra and Computation, and Comptes rendus are tied for rank 257. Communication in Algebra does not (as far as I can tell) have a JCR impact factor, and neither do Vestnik of St. Petersburg University and Proceedings of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. These are not the kind of publication venues that are considered to be particularly significant and prestigious. Note that in relation to C1, WP:PROF explicitly says:  Simply having authored a large number of published academic works is not considered sufficient to satisfy Criterion 1. Nsk92 (talk) 05:01, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * It's having them cited that is sufficient (in this case marginally). Xxanthippe (talk) 05:28, 18 August 2017 (UTC).
 * Regarding the citations -- yes, that's an individual judgement call (as I said, in my opinion, in the absence of any additional indicators, I personally do not consider citability data in this case to be strong enough, although others may disagree). I was responding to SwisterTwister's comments above ``as the listed publications in significant publications are an inclincation to consider significance indeed for WP:PROF" and ``...the publications alone can be considered sufficient". Nsk92 (talk) 11:07, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:56, 18 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete--Beautifully put by the nom.I had some thoughts on Xanthippe's arguments but the h-index seems low even for a scrape.If someone can bring any other argument of notability, I am willing to change my mind!Regards:)Godric on Leave (talk) 10:31, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Comment: Not much useful at ru:Евгений Борисович Плоткин. He might sometimes appear as "Evgeny...", but no leads found. ~Hydronium~Hydroxide~(Talk)~ 11:02, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Weak delete. Apparently I removed a BLPPROD from this article in early 2014. He seems to be a reasonably successful mathematics professor. But being reasonably successful as a professor isn't (and shouldn't be) the same as being notable here, and I just don't see anything that stands out as a justification for keeping this article. And it doesn't seem like it would cause much damage to the encyclopedia to let it go; it's not like it has a lot of incoming links or anything like that. We have a lot of other articles on academics of comparable or smaller notability, but that's also not a good reason to keep this one. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:47, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Israel-related deletion discussions. North America1000 08:18, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
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 * Delete. This article has no notability. -- cyɾʋs ɴɵtɵɜat bʉɭagɑ!!! ( Talk  |  Contributions ) 02:51, 20 August 2017 (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.