Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Nalini Venkatasubramanian


 * 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:SNOW and Speedy Keep (nominator !voted Keep) &mdash; Spaceman  Spiff  18:27, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Nalini Venkatasubramanian

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

No noteworthy accomplishemnets to meet WP:PROF, there are few with average number of Google scholar citattions. She is not there yet, may be after few years she may become wiki notable kaeiou (talk) 16:20, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 16:27, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 16:27, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. 259 published articles and a h-index of 21, in 10 years (and a full professor too)--Sodabottle (talk) 16:43, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment Thanks for the detail output and the tool. Is that good enough with no significant awards or fellowship or medals? What # fromWP:PROF corresponds to this? Well, she works in applied science in this case it is CS. Obviously one tends to write more papers in that area. Thx.--kaeiou (talk) 16:55, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I have seen no hard numbers for either citations or h index in previous AfD decisions. But as far as i know, anything near 20 h index usually gets kept. I may be wrong and as you have put, applied sciences do see more research output than hard sciences and obscure humanities fields--Sodabottle (talk) 17:08, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I do agree with you. Rightnow I'm not finding a # in WP:PROF. Let someone CS professor say something and I will decide what I want to do on this as a nominator. Thanks.--kaeiou (talk) 17:25, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * H-index is relevant to satisfying criterion #1 of WP:PROF and is usually invoked in AfD discussions in that context. Nsk92 (talk) 20:53, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep The reason there are no numbers in WP:PROF is because it varies drastically from field to field over an order of magnitude, even in the sciences:  30 papers is very good in physical chemistry, but not in medical science. Further, to many people --including myself--h index is used only because it's convenient, not because it is a valid measurement of scholarly quality:  because an index of 21 could mean  21 papers with 21 citations each or 20 papers with 200 citations each and 1 paper with 21.  The actual distribution shown on the GScholar output given is  88, 84, 82, 58 58 etc.; to me and most academics, the importance of the work is the importance  of the best of the work. A lot of mediocre work does not make one notable; a little  really first-rate work does, just as o a writer gets notable by writing some good books, not by writing lots of mediocre ones.     Whether her  record is good enough would depend on the area of computer science, but I would say it probably is.  But there's a complication: her work is in a field of computer science where almost all work is presented in conferences, some of which have actual high quality peer-review, and some of which do not (a rough guide is that any of the papers republished by the ACM or IEEE are high-quality). Google scholar does not differentiate for this. Scopus does, do a considerable extent:  the  results from GS, will therefore always be higher than G Scholar, generally   around twice as high in most fields, three times as high in conference-dependent fields. .  In Scopus, I find 92 included articles,  with highest citations 24, 17, 25, 14 -- as expected.   As an example of the problems involved, , the highest cited  in the G Scholar search,   is not in Scopus at all, and in fact is an invited paper, not a contributed one, , which usually means it is  essentially a keynote asked of an important scientist, but not actually peer-reviewed--the quality control is that the scientist is trusted by the organizing committee. Additionally, it is in a relatively minor conference, European Wireless 2002 . As for those who want third party references, we specifically have WP:PROF because of the difficulty of getting conventional 3rd party references until people die. An alternate way to look on it is that the citations from other workers in the field are the 3rd party references that count.    DGG ( talk ) 21:36, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Comment Thank you DGG and others on this. I’ll withdraw this afd nomination for Nalini Venkataraman unless users want to see in the next 7 days what others would say on this. I feel that WP:PROF guidelines are inadequate (too compact) in such things while we have several senerios within scenarios. And data is not complete and is not adequate. In some cases, for example in computer science, data is there. In some cases, we don’t find data at all. Having all these on hand, it is still difficult to judge because those criteria outlined in WP:PROF does not cover all possible cases. How do you treat fiction, non-fictions, applied science, pure mathematics, medical science, engineering, humanities, social science, behavioral science, rhetorical, lawyers, politicians, government officers etc? And on the top, these educational systems vary from country to country – In India and in many English speaking countries, the head of the department is always the senior person where as in the US and in some places, it could be anyone in between. In WP:PROF, Chair/Head is WP:PROF notable. Again it is also said that he or she is from a major institution (how do you define this or is it assumed all higher education institutes are major? Or how could one say that this university is a reputed one in a dynamic world?)?

What would you do if someone has high h-index (may be just one very good paper) today and down the road he/she ends up with ZERO papers for the rest of the life? Thanks. Respectfully --kaeiou (talk) 22:46, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
 * What I would do is leave the editing of these pages to people with knowledge and experience of the worlds of academia, scholarship and research, just as the editing of any other specialised topic is best left to experts in that particular topic. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:34, 4 March 2010 (UTC).
 * I'm not getting what you are trying to say. Are you saying that who votes here are from academia (professors)? Anyway thanks. --kaeiou (talk) 23:58, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep in view of citation record of substantial contributions to scholarship. DGG correctly draws attention to the complexities of citation analysis. Looking back at past decisions on these pages I find that subjects with indicies of less than 10 are usually found to be not notable, those with greater than 15 are usually found to be notable. Many hundreds of publications are expected. This subject, with an h index of 21, clearly passes according to this criterion. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC).
 * comment Many hundreds of publications are expected is not true. Thx.--kaeiou (talk) 23:28, 4 March 2010 (UTC)


 * In response to some earlier questions:, normally, when one finds someone with one very good paper only, it's because the paper was written when a grad student or postdoc, and the name was added to a paper on a project the person works on but is not responsible for, and thus does not indicate notability . I can think of people who did their best work very early on, but I can not at the moment think of anyone who did excellent work once only very early on and then never did anything significant at all.  If this should occur, once notable, always notable is the guideline, as with a person who appears in a single Olympics game, or who wins a seat for one term in a state legislature.
 * the question of who is a significantly responsible author in multiauthor papers has been critical at a number of these discussions. There are no hard-and-fast rules from position of authors names--the various fields have different conventions, and individual labs often assign authorship in their own fashion. The different academic ranks are distinguished by the greater assumed independence. One would not be appointed to a tenured associate professor position unless the department were confident that one could do good independent work, normally shown by doing  good work as an assistant professor, not just as a post doc. Exceptions would be if the work was known to experts in the field as independent. The most difficult situations are in major earth science, astrophysics, and experimental physics projects, where the publications may have hundreds of names--or in some cases, just a name for the collective and no names at all.  In a case like this it is impossible for an outside to tell based on bibliometric analysis--one has to go by what insiders think, and this is normally shown by formal academic positions. In industry, where there are large projects but a less formal hierarchy of positions,  there is often no way at all for outsiders to know.
 * The meaning of head of department is variable: in most US institutions, it is not necessarily the most prestigious person in the department--who may well refuse the position or be administratively incompetent, but it always is one of the higher ranking ones--as they need to have the respect of their colleagues.  The rating of universities is tricky: there is no institution so low that it may not have a few excellent people. There are many universities were some fields are of established excellence. There are also a few where all the subjects they offer are of established excellence and international prestige. This is not something that leads to exact measurement, but there can be a good deal of consensus.
 * There is considerable recent work across several fields, which i will review somewhere here if the blp pressure lets up, that within a subject in the sciences, the principle factors for quality are the two axes of number of citations per article  and number of articles published.    DGG ( talk ) 02:03, 5 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep per DGG, common outcomes. This is a full professor, with a great number of well-referenced publications, as well as working on important issues.  She easily meets WP:PROF.  This nomination appears to be based on the rationale that brown women are not "wiki notable". Bearian (talk)
 * Thats unfair Bearian. I have argued with the nominator often enough at AfD to know that, he doesn't have anything against "brown women". He is just thorough thats all. In fact his AfDs have resulted in many articles getting better (just to prove him wrong).--Sodabottle (talk) 06:57, 5 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep and close by all means - Oh boy, no chance even in my dream for what Bearian wrote above. I got to go and will shed some light(background) on this after retuning from workplace (Est Time). I do not use wiki at workplace to respect work ethics. Thanks to DGG and Sodabottle. --kaeiou (talk) 12:50, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep: good publication list on GS. -- Radagast3 (talk) 11:24, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep Notable and sourced. (User) Mb (Talk) 12:45, 5 March 2010 (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.