Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jonas Alster


 * 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.  bibliomaniac 1  5  06:36, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Jonas Alster

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Certainly accomplished, but doesn't meet WP:GNG, and I can see nowhere where he passes any of the criteria of WP:NSCHOLAR. The response on the article talk page when the prod was removed is interesting.  Onel 5969  TT me 17:31, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  Onel 5969  TT me 17:31, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Israel-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 17:34, 10 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Keep: It's indeed an interesting response, in that it demonstrates how throwing unexplained terms at newcomers can be deeply unintuitive. If half the claims here are accurate, this guy should sail past NPROF. I would not expect particularly mainstream coverage from someone in this man's position, and that would be exactly why the SNG exists in this case. Vaticidalprophet (talk) 19:30, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment. He does have some highly cited papers, which seem to be published under "J Alster".  He however appears to typically be middle author on a papers with a large number of coauthors, but it is hard to separate this J Alster from others. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 19:38, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Leaning delete. I have the same reservations as Russ Woodroofe regarding relative authorship contributions. This field of physics also gets high citations--many of his publications are multi-collaborator measurements of nucleon form factors, which then get cited by every experimental and theoretical paper that touches on (e.g.) proton internal structure (at least until someone measures a slightly larger (e.g.) Q2 range). Perks of having access to an accelerator, I guess. I've compiled the Scopus values for total citations, total publications, and h-index for Dr. Alster and 97 coauthors of his 5ish most cited papers. Citations : median: 8370, average: 15972, Alster: 3698. Publications : med: 136, avg: 265, A: 98. h-index : med: 46, avg: 49, A: 36. From these data I would say he is a pretty run-of-the-mill physicist for effective field theory, and so wouldn't meet PROF C1 criteria. I certainly wouldn't say the measurements provide important breakthroughs in QCD understanding. I don't know if any of the positions he's held would bring up the slack in the other PROF categories, though. JoelleJay (talk) 03:59, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Addendum: Some of the complaints about my citation analysis are valid, for example the issues with analyzing the top-cited works (which might be more likely to have older and more prominent coauthors). However, most of the alternative methods of evaluating C1 are much less appropriate as they assume uniform citation standards across the sciences, which inflates the importance of high-citation fields and diminishes that of low-citation fields. See, for example, the issues highlighted in this AfD by myself and others regarding interpreting cite counts and h-indices and the necessity of contextualizing metrics with within-field comparisons. Inasmuch as citation analysis can be used for C1 assessment--and it seems it is the #1 method here--the reliability of generalizing to every field one's personal, intuitive preconception of what constitutes "high citation number" will inevitably have much worse predictive value (re: predicting a subdiscipline's average citation count) the further one gets from one's specialty. So, I try to get a feel for a subject's subdiscipline by looking at their coauthors' metrics, and when there aren't many coauthors, I look at coauthors-of-coauthors. This provides the most practical control group for an academic's body of work--you don't have to blindly estimate impact by artificially reconstructing what constitutes a person's "field", which is usually difficult to nail down and even more difficult to make adequate comparisons within it; you just have to look up a sufficient number of coauthors across a sufficient range of time and article prominence. JoelleJay (talk) 21:40, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Keep. I'm interested by the talk page comment that an invited review in Physics Reports on your own work is a major honour. I think that's likely to be true (it is true of certain Annual Reviews in my fields), but it doesn't fit well into our models of significance. Perhaps one of the physicists editing here could comment? The article seems to have been written by academics who know the subject is notable, and therefore don't bother to try to demonstrate it according to our (to them I suspect ridiculous) rules. The top Google Scholar citations (somewhat confused by what looks to be another J Alster), 594,491,379,216,203, seem to me enough to meet WP:PROF, even though I agree the water is muddied by some multi-author papers in there. Taking another approach, and looking at the papers the article author(s) have highlighted where Alster is the first/second author, there are some high citations here: 216, 86 and three others around 50, although others are lower (or don't actually have Alster as 1st/2nd author, at least with the limited information I'm getting from the online abstracts; it seems possible Alster was leading one team of researchers, but the authors are listed by institution: without seeing the actual publications, which are paywalled, one can't tell). Per comments elsewhere and on JoelleJay's talk page, I fear their method of citation analysis is systematically flawed. Espresso Addict (talk) 17:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 12:49, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * FWIW, Scopus reports citation highs of 315, 265, 186, 164, and 103 (none first author). Dividing the total citations by publication number for him and his 97 coauthors shows an average of 71 and median of 59 citations per paper and Dr. Alster at 34. This shouldn't be used as a major criterion to assess notability of course, but it does demonstrate how much citation goes on in this field. Another important aspect to note is that often (but def not always) in physical sciences authors are listed alphabetically, so you have to make sure the "first-author" refs actually use weighted contribution since he will very often end up alphabetically first. JoelleJay (talk) 21:40, 18 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Weak keep. The citability in GScholar is sufficiently impressive. His faculty profile page  also lists a couple of prizes, Batsheva Rothschild prize, 1970 and Helena and Philip Spitzer Award, Israel  Science Foundation, 1996. They seem to be from mostly pre-online era (and probably one would have to search in Hebrew anyway), but I am inclined to AGF this info. I think there is enough here for a pass of WP:PROF. Nsk92 (talk) 02:49, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Weak keep. It's a high-citation field but the citation numbers from Nsk92's search look good enough for me. (I had previously looked for him as author with spelled-out first name and didn't find anything highly cited that way.) —David Eppstein (talk) 08:38, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep. There's a good number of citations which justifies the creation of the article. Looks fine to me. Mightberightorwrong (talk) 12:34, 19 February 2021 (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.