Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Richard Massey


 * 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. In light of the consensus that subject is notable, the article is retained.  MBisanz  talk 21:34, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Richard Massey
Discussion to run until at least 8 February 2009 (UTC)


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Subject is not sufficiently notable. He does not hold a tenured position, has not done genuinely groundbreaking research, nor is he a leader in his field. Many people have published on the journal Nature or been interviewed on the BBC. Neither makes them notable. Puffino (talk) 10:28, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete, academic is not notable. --Anna Lincoln (talk) 11:37, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep Quoted on dark matter in "State of the Universe 2008."  List of papers at [ http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~rjm/papers.php] Guest at ACKS seminar  and a multitude of other cites readily available. This is not just a person who was interviewed by the BBC and written for Nature at all. "Senior postdoctoral scholar" is a fairly high title, by the way. Cerncourier is not a blog ...  says "The international collaboration led by Richard Massey, also from Caltech, analysed the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) ... " which rather implies that he was the head of that project, hence notable there as well. Collect (talk) 16:19, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * A senior postdoctoral fellow is, if you like, a temporary "training" job before one applies for a university lectureship in the UK, or an assistant professorship in the US. There are many many people who hold temporary jobs of this nature, and many of them do not go on to become faculty members at the same or some other university at all.  So he has forty papers.  Most cosmologists/astrophysicists/physicists of his experience have about forty papers.  His citation count is also not amazing (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?rawcmd=FIND+A+MASSEY%2C+R&FORMAT=wwwcitesummary&SEQUENCE=). That's like the minimum you need to survive in academia.  Likewise, many people make it to the CERN courier; I'd say 90% of them are not on WP.  The COSMOS survey is led by Nicolas Scoville and Bill Green (http://cosmos.astro.caltech.edu/overview/members.html).  Anyone interested to write WP articles for these two?  The ACKS seminar series are just an internal seminar series at Stanford.  Most physicists of similar experience are invited to give seminars of this kind on a routine basis.  That's how we sell our works!  Look, I'm not saying Massey is no good, and he may well become notable enough in the future to be worth a WP article.  But at the moment he is not. Puffino (talk) 17:35, 3 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete, unless someone can come up with more information than what's on the page right now, which hardly establishes notability. §FreeRangeFrog 20:01, 3 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Living people-related deletion discussions. --Erwin85Bot (talk) 00:01, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Weak keep At the moment, he is no longer Senior Postdoctoral Scholar at Caltech, but "Advanced Fellow" at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Such designations  can mean quite a variety of things, depending on the university; it can be part of a nonprofessorial research line that can in some cases be tenured and very senior.  In this case, he went to SPDS immediately after an ordinary postdoc, so it's essentially not really a high level position; in American terms, I'd put his present position as something like Research Assistant Professor  which is not enough by itself for notability. As a check, he is currently supervising his first PhD student, as an Assistant Professor would do. In any case, he needs to be judged by the work, whether he meets the PROF criterion of being an authority in his subject. It sometimes happens that for one reason or another non-academic press gets itself interested in a relatively junior scientist; if it does to a sufficiently great extent, it's notability, but the one BBC reference is not enough for that here. Scopus shows 47 published papers, with citation counts 64, 52, 49, 44. The highest one with him as principal author is, not surprisingly, the Nature paper in 2007, with 41 citations by now. If half the citations come the first 2 or 3 years, as in a very fast moving corner of things, it will reach over 100,along with some of  his other papers.   I think  that he's borderline, just about to become notable.  If we don't put it in now, we probably will a year from now.  DGG (talk) 04:15, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * an interesting illustration of the insecurity of judgment by title, is Michael Kurtz from Harvard-Smithsonian, (80 or so papers, citation counts 175, 147, 112), though without a WP article so far; his title is "Astronomer"  -- nothing more. DGG (talk) 04:22, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.   —John Z (talk) 04:35, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep. Along with the usual arguments about how his work is well-cited enough to pass WP:PROF #1 (probably only good enough for a weak keep in his case), he seems to have attracted a reasonable amount of mainstream media attention. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:21, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep I agree with DGG that he is borderline as a scientist for the moment, but that he'll certainly pass our criteria very soon (even if he would stop working right now...) I agree with David Eppstein that the mainstream attention sways the case to a keep. --Crusio (talk) 09:37, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - Citation counts should always be interpreted with the citation practices of the field in mind. In this case, 40 citations in two years may seem like a lot in some fields.  But when compared with well-known papers published in the past few years in the same field, it falls way way short.  An example is "Detection of the baryon acoustic peak in the large-scale correlation function of SDSS luminous red galaxies." from January 2005: cited 735 times all time, 90 times in the first year after publication (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?eprint=astro-ph/0501171). And of course, the ultimate show-stopper, "Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation" from March 2008: 747 citations in less than a year (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?eprint=arXiv:0803.0547).  Incidentally, neither of the first authors of these works has a WP article.  What these citation stats tells us is that the cosmology community deems the Massey paper interesting, but far from influential.   It is a good paper however, and will certainly help to land him on the shortlist for a university lectureship (an STFC/PPARC advanced fellowship, by the way, is a non-tenurable 5-year fellowship), but not on the shortlist for a major award.   Another point is that every large scale survey like the COSMOS survey will pick up a few hundred citations over its lifetime; otherwise it wouldn't be worth the taxpayers' money spent on them.  But is every observation bound to yield a significant/influential result?  The answer is clearly no.   As for the mainstream media picking up on this paper, maybe it's simply correlated with the fact that the paper was published in Nature, which every respectable science journalist knows (and scours for publishable material), not a specialised journal? Puffino (talk) 16:16, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment According to ISI's Essential Science Indicators, a 2007 paper in Physics that has 43 citations, falls in the top 0.1% most cited papers of 2007. To be in the top 1%, 17 citations is enough. Given that the paer we are talking about here has 40 citations, this has ot be in the top 0.2% or something like that. Apparently, 41 citations for a paper published in 2007 is a lot.... --Crusio (talk) 16:48, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I am honestly intrigued by these numbers. Can you tell me exactly where you found them?  They are decidedly low; accordingly, of the five papers I (a physicist) published in 2007, one is in the top 0.1%, another in probably the top 0.5%, and two others in the top 1%.  And I assure you, I am not notable.Puffino (talk) 17:41, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Good for you, I'm envious (didn't get higher than the top 10% in my own field.... :-). The Essential Science Indicators are part of the Web of Knowledge/Web of Science. Click on the "select database" tab and you'll find them there. It's the baselines that you will want to see after that. As you are a publishing physicist, I assume that your institution has access to these databases. Our access goes through a special gateway, so the URLs I use would not be of any use to you. --Crusio (talk) 17:56, 4 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Keep. Per David Eppstein and Crusio. I believe he meets WP:PROF criterion #1 (significant impact in scholarly discipline, broadly construed). Also probably meets WP:BIO based on independent media coverage.--Eric Yurken (talk) 02:14, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment - To me the numbers from the Essential Science Indicators for physics provided by Crusio are very strange. The only explanation I can think of is that there are some significant differences in the citation trends within different subdiscplines of physics.  In this case, the subdiscipline is cosmology, and speaking as a cosmologist working at a major research insitution, 40 citations in two years do not qualify the paper as having made a significant impact in the field.  (For the record, I don't work on exactly the same topic as Massey so we are not competitors.  But our topics are so closely related that I have in fact, on one or two occasions, contributed to his citation count.)  Notes and Examples 1 in WP:PROF says "... Differences in typical citation and publication rates and in publication conventions between different academic disciplines should be taken into account". Many young cosmologists of similar experience have this kind of citation counts or better.  Example, go to UC Berkeley TAC (http://astro.berkeley.edu/tac/) or Cambridge IoA (http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/), and do a citation search for the postdoctoral fellows.  Now there are some seriously impressive looking numbers...  Footnote 4 of WP:PROF says "... The meaning of "substantial number of publications" and "high citation rates" is to be interpreted in line with the interpretations used by major research institutions in the awarding of tenure."   The fact that he does not yet have tenure shows that the paper did not create such an impact that everyone is rushing out to give him a job.  I am sorry if I seem a little pushy here.  But this is such a gross misrepresentation of who is important and who is not in my field that I feel I have to defend it. Puffino (talk) 12:30, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. I think your expert comments here are very useful, and should be taken into consideration by the deciding admin. In my view, sometimes a combination of choice of topic (e.g., dark matter mapping) and media coverage will push someone into the scope of criterion #1, although that is not always the case. Also, as far as academics are concerned, Wikipedia is not only about excellence, although more often than not it is. Someone may be notable because he or she is lucky in the choice of topic, or in the choice of how to address a topic. I can also see the possibility of notability as a academic by making a major blunder, or committing academic fraud.--Eric Yurken (talk) 16:35, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I actually went to the Berkeley site that you gave and looked up some of the postdocs listed there on WoS. I limited myself to those who had names that were more likely to be unique, to minimize the amount of time this would cost me. This is what I found: Niccolo Bucciantini, highest cited article (2003) 58 cites; Joe Hennawi (2004) 138 cites (2nd author), another one with 127 cites (9th out of very many authors). Highest cited article as first author (2003) 34 cites. Rowin Meijerink (2005) 41 cites; Ian Parrish (2005) 23 cites. Given that I would expect Berkeley to amass some of the best postdocs, I don't really see your point that this is so much better than Massey, in fact, most of it is lower. Concerning citations rates, I also looked at the impact factors of journals in the ISI category "ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS". The five highest ranked journals have IFs of 20.3 - 7.9 - 7.7 - 6.4 - 6.1. This does not really suggest to me that the percentile data from "Essential Science Indicators" are wrong, these IFs indeed suggest that 40 citations for a paper published in 2007 is exceptional. Where do you get your citation counts? --Crusio (talk) 17:19, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Reply to Crusio: I was trying to avoid naming names here, but it looks like I have to name a few. Try Lewis and Peiris at Cambridge IoA.  These actually give a fairer comparison, since both hold exactly the same position as Massey ("STFC advanced fellow") and so can be considered as having similar experience.  For Lewis, highest first author cite is about 400 (two papers).  Peiris's best first author cite is 600.  This was written with a famous collaboration.  But even after discounting this, Peiris's next best first author cites are easily above 40 (two papers from the late 2006).  Or Percival at Portsmouth (not your usual top bracket university, http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/~percivalw/) who is also an advanced fellow: best first author cite is 370 (paper from May 2001), and more recently a paper from May 2007 (newer than Massey's) with 73 refereed cites.  (I'm only quoting refereed cites by the way.)  Even Zahn at Berkeley, a younger guy and a theorist not attached to a large collaboration (and therefore less likely to pick up citations than an observer; see footnote 4 of WP:PROF), has an April 2006 first author paper with 60 cites.  I can go on naming individuals...  Another thing you need to take into account is that some cosmologists also publish in more particle physics related areas, in which alphabetical listings of authors are the norm.  In these cases principal authorship is difficult to establish.  I get my citations from two sources: SPIRES at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires and NASA ADS http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/.   SPIRES is more focused on high energy physics, while ADS is more on astrophysics.  Neither is terribly complete, but ADS has a function which allows you to filter out only citations in refereed journals. Puffino (talk) 19:29, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * More names (I'm actually having a bit of fun with this). These are all STFC advanced fellows (I'm not even going outside of the UK): Christian Wolf of Oxford, best first author cite 173.  (By the way, I am only quoting the best first author cite; naturally these people all have other papers, first author or otherwise, with 100+ or 50+ citations.  And I'm restricting myself to galaxies and larger; stellar and planetary physics are a different game again.  All cite info comes from ADS http://www.adsabs.harvard.edu/, citations from refereed articles only.}  David Bacon of Portsmouth (actually a collaborator of Massey): 200 for a paper from 2000 which picked up 80 citations in the first two years (actually that was a very interesting result: they first showed that weak gravitational lensing by large scale structures of the universe can be detected, a technique later used by Massey et al. to make the Dark Matter Map).  Michele Cappellari of Oxford, 138.  D Farrah of Uni Sussex, 71 cites.  M. T. Murphy, Cambridge, 155 cites.  Uttley, Southampton, 82.  My internet connection is not very good so I'll stop here.  Maybe tomorrow I'll continue with the Emmy Noether fellows in Germany (another non-tenured 5-year glorified postdoc job). Puffino (talk) 23:37, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Reply to Eric Yurken: Yes, there is certainly an element of luck here. "Dark matter mapping" is admittedly more palatable to the general public than "A Mini-landscape of exact MSSM spectra in heterotic orbifolds" (a paper, not mine, of similar vintage and citation), and therefore more readily attracts media attention.  If mere media coverage is a sufficient criterion to make a scientist doing his regular job notable, then so be it. Puffino (talk) 19:29, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * These SPIRES/arXiv counts being given are like counts from Google Scholar or arXiv, giving references made not just from published papers, but from lectures, preprints, notes, theses, and unpublished working material of all sorts. When using GS, there's a rough rule of thumb to convert to actual peer-reviewed citations: divide by 2. From arXiv in physics, dividing by 3 is usually closer. For astronomy, with its incredibly well developed system for non-article posted communications, I'm not sure how to do the comparison. Certainly looking at a  sample I think maybe the factor should be 4 or 5. I haven't tried the ADS filter yet--and I want to consult a specialist.  DGG (talk) 00:09, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I am however not happy with negative arguments such as "only doing his job". That's the same as the frequent deletion reason "Just another ...". Scientists becomes notable from doing  their job, just as do football players. Some are more notable than others--this can arise from having done their job better, or happening to appeal to the public, or just luck. If I were reviewing people for tenure, I'd certainly try to separate the ones who are making an actual permanent contribution from the others--particularly the ones who are likely to continue making fundamental permanent contributions. (these can be very long arguments, when a group of strong-minded people try to predict the future, especially when there are a fixed number of openings, and many people to choose from.  But fortunately we don't have to decide that. We're just looking for notability, however achieved. We are not the arbiters of scientific merit. we have no quota of astronomers. We  don't have to fund the people whose articles get here, or work in the next room to them for the rest of our career. If people are at all likely to look up someone in an encyclopedia,  the article should be here.  This reminds me of the commercial spammers saying "but you have articles on our (usually much larger & better-known) competitors.  We're not here to do Justice any more than to find the Truth.  DGG (talk) 00:20, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that SPIRES will, generally for high energy physicits, overestimate their citations (but factor of 4 or 5 is way high; factor of 1.5 to 2 per refereed paper is more realistic). It's usually less of a problem for astrophysics because SPIRES does not focus on this area.  But to avoid this problem, I made the point of quoting numbers only from ADS with the refereed filter switched on.  For a quick comparison, if you do a search for the Massey paper under consideration on ADS, you get 61 cites without the filter, and 43 with filter.  The second number is essentially what you quoted from your Scopus search earlier.   (SPIRES gives it 45 by the way.) Scientific merit constitutes the crux of Criterion #1 of WP:PROF (otherwise why all the discussions here about what is a high citation rate?).  But if the consensus is that media coverage overrides that, then there is really nothing more I can say. Puffino (talk) 10:29, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
 * just as a side point, I think the factor is affected by the years examined--about half the most recent unpublished work tends to get published after a few years. DGG (talk) 01:03, 7 February 2009 (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.