Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Maximiliano Korstanje


 * 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 and salt. TonyBallioni (talk) 02:31, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Maximiliano Korstanje

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This person is marginally notable. Marginally; not slam dunk. It is unclear what the US equivalent of their faculty position is, the journal they are chief editor for, is published by his own university. He has published some books and articles, and been discussed a bit in local (!) press. Normally I think folks would be OK with letting this slide. However the page was pounded by a sock farm for a while as is evident in the history and the talk page, and even after they were all blocked and the page was protected, obviously related IP editors keep popping up to urge some content be added or changed, leading even an admin to edit by proxy on their behalf (today's block-evading diff, removed per BLOCKEVASION, yet implemented here.) Keeping this around is good for nobody except the people trying to abuse WP to promote this person; trying to maintain this page as something other than a vanity page is a drain on the volunteer editing community. Jytdog (talk) 21:28, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep - passes WP:ACADEMIC #8 as "head or chief editor of a major, well-established academic journal in their subject area", as they created and are the Editor in Chief of the first journal in their field, and #1 as having made a significant impact in their field, per creating the first journal and as they are listed as one of the most published researchers in their area with a h-index of 25 and 2700 citations, which is significantly high. - Bilby (talk) 21:42, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 22:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Argentina-related deletion discussions.  Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 22:18, 5 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I suppose one could describe "International Journal of Safety and Security in Tourism / Hospitality" as a "a major, well-established academic journal in their subject area"... however it being a) hosted on the department website; b) electronic-only as far as I can tell: c) not in Scopus or JCR (I searched each) -- would make it appear .. marginal in that definition. Pinging User:Randykitty (with whom I disagree plenty of times, so this is not canvassing) to get their thoughts on this journal. About his being "one of the most published researhers", I found those two papers about publications in the field of tourism so odd; I don't see many papers in well-established fields where people do this kind of navel gazing. It is like they are trying to establish the field as something legitimate and show the world just who the people are who publish in it.  Like I said, overall N is marginal for this person.  Jytdog (talk) 13:39, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The journal is most certainly not a pass of PROF#8. It's not indexed anywhere and it'll be a long time before that happens, too, judging from the broken English on its homepage. The citation record (judging from his GScholar profile) is above what we generally find sufficient in these discussions (>1000 citations, h-index > 20), but I don't know if this is a high-citation field and GScholar can be gamed. Some of the books are with reputed publishers such as Routledge, which is an indication of notability (but it would be nice to have a book review, for example). --Randykitty (talk) 16:37, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your input. Jytdog (talk) 17:22, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Why do you say it is not indexed anywhere? It is indexed in both ProQuest and EBSCOHost. That was already established. The query is only whether or not it is a significant journal in its subject area, and that seems to hold - hence the decent citations and h-index. - Bilby (talk) 19:27, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I should have been more exact: "not indexed in any selective databases". Neither ProQuest nor EBSCOHost are normally taken as indicating any notability, just independent proof that a journal exists. As it is not even in Scopus (the selective database that is easiest to get into), it may be a significant journal like you say, but we don't have any evidence (i.e., independent reliable sources) supporting that claim. Personally, I doubt that an English language journal whose website is full of grammatical errors is anything near significant. --Randykitty (talk) 05:49, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That seems fair enough. To be honest, I felt that the significance of the journal came from being the first in the field, and that it turned up on a few "these journals are worth reading" lists in regard to terrorism, which suggested that it was important in the specialty. My interest in EBSECO and ProQuest was that they showed the journal was not rubbish, rather than they showed anything about the overall significance on their own (given that there are enough journals that don't meet that bar). Thanks for your help - we'll leave the focus on Academic #1. - Bilby (talk) 09:49, 7 April 2018 (UTC)


 * For others who arrive, please do see recent examples of the promotional pressure from socking/block-evading IPs, Special:Contributions/190.139.136.123, which has added to its comments the names "Pope" (e.g. diff) and "Bob" (e.g. diff). Jytdog (talk) 14:50, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I find the occasional brief post by the IPs to be easily managed. Since it was semi protected, if there have been difficulties working on the article, they have come from established editors unrelated to the subject rather than the socks. - Bilby (talk) 20:43, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Lovely. I will not respond to you further. Jytdog (talk) 20:59, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * OK, but that has been my experience. Sometimes other factors come into play, rather than socking, that make things more combative than we'd like. Nothing has been done in bad faith, or with anything other than the interests of WP in mind, but I haven't found the socks to be the main factor in any difficulties with the article, so much as differing (reasonable) opinions on how best to manage it. - Bilby (talk) 21:03, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * All you did there was repeat yourself, removing the "if". Please review my note to you here. If I need to bring this up again it will be at AN requesting a formal IBAN. Jytdog (talk) 22:48, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I should have better explained my view with the first comment. I thought this second description better explained where I sit. I should note that I was not referring to you with my comment - I unreservedly apologize for failing to make that clear, and I can see how it could be read that way. - Bilby (talk) 23:02, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Delete. The claim of a "major journal" is problematic. It is a journal on his own idiosyncratic interest started by him and published by his own institution. Major? Zero evidence of that. He is clearly a gifted self-publicist, and gives great attention to bigging up his reputation, but in the end he's a 41-year-old early career academic. The article was started by a sockpuppet. Much of the subject's publication has been in predatory journals or academic vanity press. It'#s resume-padding, and always has been. Guy (Help!) 22:08, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep -- Handcounted h-index of 15 from GScholar. Some works have a lot of citations, e.g. 144, 95, 79.  Furthermore his work is included in five distinct bibliographical lists from the journal Perspectives on Terrorism which shows peer recognition. 192.160.216.52 (talk) 18:13, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, North America1000 12:02, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete I don't buy Bilby's argument. Subject fails WP:NPROF. Subject also fails ANYBIO and GNG. This article has been the target of multiple users and IPs seeking to promote the subject, so I'd also ask the closing admin to SALT the title so we're never bothered with this foolishness again. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 16:15, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * What would you regard as enough to show that an academic has made a significant impact in their field? - Bilby (talk) 22:09, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * PROF #1 requires independent reliable sources that actually support that claim. The citations you provided seem to indicate the subject is prolific, but that doesn't mean he's had any impact. H-index isn't an acceptable standard, either. Terrorism is my field and nobody here is mentioning Korstanje's work, let alone assigning it. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 22:37, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * 27000 citations seems significant, as do the two independent journal articles that list him as a major researcher. That said, his field isn't terrorism, it is the intersection of tourism and terrorism. - Bilby (talk) 22:46, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
 * PROF doesn't use metrics like impact factor or number of citations. Your belief that "27000 citations seems significant" is just that, a belief. I strictly follow the criteria rather than inject my own reasoning. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 22:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That's fine - we all need to tackle this based on our own understanding of what making a significant impact in a field means - in my case, very high citation count and being listed as a major researcher in independent sources are strong indicators of making a significant impact, but others may differ. - Bilby (talk) 23:04, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually, if you read the notes to criterion #1 in PROF, you'll see that number of citations is a consideration. --Randykitty (talk) 08:11, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * But the use of the phrase "highly cited" doesn't come with any metric and Notability (academics) essentially warns against most metrics !voters would look at. It says you could consider x or y but it doesn't say what's a high number of citations versus what's normal. Any consideration of things like number of citations without calibration essentially lives in the imagination because that guideline is so vague. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 11:29, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure of a way forward with PROF#1 if you won't accept citation counts as an indicator of impact. Would copies of his books held in libraries indicate significance? That at least is listed as a citation metric at the link you provided. (Accordingly to WorldCat, the first one I checked is held in 93 libraries, the second in 172). - Bilby (talk) 12:09, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

(ec) PROF does not give any firm numbers for the simple reason that these differ per field. For a mathematician, an h-index of 15 is stellar and an article receiving 100 cites is exceptional. In most life sciences, 15 is what you'd expect for an assistant professor and 100 cites for an article is not exceptional at all. I agree that this can become the source of disagreement (I've seen people vehemently argue that someone was very notable because 36 articles referenced their works-not a notable amount in any field). I am not familiar with Korstanje's field, so I don't know whether this is a high-citation density field or not. Even if it is, 2700 citations and an h-index of 25 is nothing to spit at. What is more important here is that Korstanje (according to his GScholar profile) has published a staggering 800 1085 articles. Combined with the fact that 2344 of his 2776 citations (as of this morning) stem from the last 5 years, I suspect something fishy here. Add to that the fact that Korstanje apparently publishes (quite a lot) with disreputable publishers like IGI Global and the whole picture becomes less and less flattering. I did a search in the Web of Science (using all databases, not just the core collection). WoS always renders lower results than GScholar, because the latter will include anything, even absolutely forgettable journals, as well as books and stuff published by predatory journals. So lower numbers are expected, but in this case they are way lower: 90 total publications (note that WoS does not include books and book chapters), h-index of 15, 683 citations (72 of which are self-citations). Fishier and fishier. Looks like somebody is mounting a determined publicity campaign... I didn't intend to !vote here, but writing up this analysis I have convinced myself: delete (and given the history, salting is perhaps not a bad idea). --Randykitty (talk) 12:32, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * PS: I just note that most of the better cited articles in WoS are from another M. Korstanje, a dermatologist. In addition, I forgot to mention that if you look at the citing publications in GScholar, you find extensive self-citation. This makes the whole picture even more dire. --Randykitty (talk) 12:35, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That seems fair enough to me - thanks for looking into it. - Bilby (talk) 12:38, 16 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete per Randykitty's thorough analysis and the unnatural amount of attention this article has received from socks and Single-purpose IPs, whdoes not suggest genuine notability. Pam  D  16:15, 16 April 2018 (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.