Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Paul Cordopatis


 * 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. Nobody here is really convinced that this researcher is notable.  Sandstein  17:40, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Paul Cordopatis

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Not notable. See, for example, There does not appear to be enough reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy to maintain an independent article on this topic. -- Suntag  ☼  06:45, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment Suntag, it would really help if you indicted in these nominations something specific about the subject--at least what the field of claimed notability is-- so people would know if they thought they could usefully comment. In this case, he's a science researcher, & I will, but I might well have passed this over because most of your noms are for people in fields I know nothing about. This also lets people do easier deletion sorting for the various workgroups. DGG (talk) 19:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.   —John Z (talk) 21:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Medicine-related deletion discussions.   —John Z (talk) 21:39, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:02, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep Weak Keep (see below), As it currently stands, the article is rather a mess – it's mostly a list of positions he's held and says that he makes his own wine. There's little assertion of notability, except to say that he's a professor and chair of an academic department (suggestive, but not corfirmatory of notability). However, a Web of Science search on "Author=(Cordopatis P*) AND Document Type=(ARTICLE) AND Institutions=(UNIV PATRAS)" turns up 62 journal articles with about the top 5 being cited by other articles more than 30 times. (I checked these top 5 manually and all list the u patras dept of pharmacology, suggesting they're not false positives). This is much stronger support for the subject's notability. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC).
 * Delete Résumé. No independent sources. Narayanese (talk) 22:54, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete There do not appear to be any independent reliable sources with which to verify a neutral encyclopaedia article. As it is the article is effectively a resume and this won't change unless sources covering the individual are found. If such sources do exist to be found a new article can be written around them, there is no need for Wikipedia to host this individuals resume in the meantime. Citation counting is a bad way of identifying a person/paper's importance or relevance in real life and should not be used to confer notability on Wikipedia. Guest9999 (talk) 01:05, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. Although citation counting is a common and accepted way of establishing notability for academics (both on and off wiki), I think that 5 articles with 30 citations is nothing out of the ordinary for someone working in pharmacology (if anything, it's rather low). Fails WP:ACADEMIC. --Crusio (talk) 07:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment. I urge commentators not to confuse the quality of the article (which we all agree is quite poor at the moment) with the notability of the subject. The former can be fixed, while only the latter determines whether the article itself should remain. It is patently false to say there are no sources. The scientific literature satisfies all requirements of independence and reliability and the subject appears to have >60 articles. Consequently, as Crusio notes above, the question boils down to whether this individual's documented body of contributions is notable enough for his inclusion, which is a "judgment call" in this case. Evidently, none of us are experts in this field, so it would be great if someone closer to the discipline could weigh-in. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:56, 29 October 2008 (UTC).
 * Comment I work in behavioral neuroscience, which is rather close to pharmacology. 30 citations, as far as I can see, is just average, nothing more. Only 5 out of 60 articles getting even that many seems to indicate that the other articles do not really add much to notability. The number of articles is not very indicative of notability. I have not checked the record (I base myself upon the apparently careful counting of Agricola44 above), but there exist a lot of local medical and pharmacological journals (that still are included in Web of Science and such) in which it is not too difficult to publish a large number of papers that subsequently are not or seldomly cited. I would expect to see a coupl of papers with more than (at least) a 100 citations before I start thinking about notability for a pharmacologist. --Crusio (talk) 17:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Addendum. The top article (EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF IMMUNOLOGY 30(12), 3411-3421 DEC 2000) has 65 citations, while the 2nd (JOURNAL OF IMMUNOLOGY 157(7), 3039-3045 OCT 1996) has 53. So, these would seem to fall below the notability threshold you describe. As one who admittedly does not work in this field, these still seem like very impressive numbers to me. However, I'll downgrade my recommendation above to "weak keep". Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 17:56, 29 October 2008 (UTC).
 * Comment I have had a chance now to look at WoS myself. I took all publications by "Cordopatis P*", so there is a possibility that I overestimate his impact. Even disregarding that, I only get a total of 654 citations for 133 papers, with an h index of 13. For someone who has been active in pharmacology for 30-odd years, this is decidedly unimpressive, I'm afraid. --Crusio (talk) 14:19, 30 October 2008 (UTC)


 *  Delete Weak Keep. He could meet academic/professor criterion if there were more citations to his work. I did a search for his articles in Academic Search Complete, which indexes journals in his field. Got 19 entries, in various related areas, and with ZERO citations. The order of authorship in those articles suggests that he is a good manager of reserchers, but not necessarily the one behind the key ideas in the articles.--Eric Yurken (talk) 18:00, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Academic Search Complete, though excellent in its way, is an undergraduate oriented index, that does not work for topics in the field of science, where it indexes almost none of the specialty journals, and in particular not in this subject field.  Using it as a citation index is particularly unreliable--it gets only those papers in journals indexed there that happen to be cited in journals indexed there.  In the absence of the actual reliable citation indexes, Wos and Scopus, one can always use Google Scholar.  DGG (talk) 04:49, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Academic Search Complete, like many full text databases that are indepedent from any publisher, is selective in the journals it carries. As such, it is a good additional data point. It carries various journals in the authors' field. But your point is well taken, and 19 entries (not a low number) there at least suggests that the reviewers of those journals were convinced. I am changing my delete to a weak keep. Not a keep because not enough evidence of "significant impact in their scholarly discipline" (criterion #1). Should be enough for a non-consensus and default keep anyway.--Eric Yurken (talk) 13:18, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Eric, I disagree with you on several points. First, ASO clearly is much less complete than WoS or Scopus or Google. Compare the citation data found by my WoS search above and the fact that not a single citation came up in ASO. Second, you seem to argue above that the fact that refereed journals published 19 of his papers is somehow indicative of notability. As WP:PROF argues, however, publishing is what academics do. Having published does not make someone notable, only if those publications have a measureable impact. For academics we look for that (among other things) to citations. For a novelist, that would be book reviews in reputable sources. Even a novelist who would have published 19 novels would not get an article if none of those books would ever have been reviewed. 19 articles is absolutely not impressive. WoS comes with 133 entries, but many of those are abstracts and conference proceedings (in computer science those are very important, in life sciences they are almost completely forgettable). The fact that all his articles do not get cited more than a paltry 654 times indicates low if any notability. Don't let the "654" falsely impress you either. Many of those citations will be in the style where some author says something like "previously, Jones 1999, Smith 2001, Crusio 1830, and Yurken 2006 also studied this question, but we added some significant modifications to this study" and that may be the last you'll see in that particular article. So many citations are basically meaningless. For that reason, only a large amount of citations will indicate that someone has impacted her/his field in a significant way and, hence, notability. --Crusio (talk) 15:59, 1 November 2008 (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.