Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Samo Stanič


 * 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. postdlf (talk) 02:48, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Samo Stanič

 * – ( View AfD View log )

Associate professor of physics at University of Nova Gorica since 2006. Says he has co-authored more than 400 papers, but only found 2 papers in which he was primary author. Other claim of fame is chair of the organizing committee of the International Conference on Time and Matter and the editor of the proceedings of the conference. Usually the proceedings is a collection of abstracts or short papers from people giving talks at the conference. Article was created by User:Sstanic. Bgwhite (talk) 23:57, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  —Bgwhite (talk) 23:57, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  —Bgwhite (talk) 00:02, 29 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Delete. I can find almost nothing on GS. Delete unless a better search reveals more. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:30, 29 March 2011 (UTC).
 * Delete Fails WP:ACADEMIC. Google scholar search brings up very few citations to his work. --LK (talk) 03:05, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Comment: A member of a high energy physics collaboration will generally be a coauthor of every paper produced by the collaboration, which explains the 400 papers. In large collaborations, the number of coauthors can be in the hundreds or thousands.  This certainly makes it more difficult for someone outside of the collaboration to judge whether an individual member is notable.  The subject's personal web site contains a list of all the papers. Will Orrick (talk) 03:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Why aren't these papers on GS? Why are there no cites to them? Xxanthippe (talk) 04:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC).
 * I'm not sure how Google deals with the hundreds-of-coauthors problem. If you type "Abreu Delphi" or "Abe Belle" you get lots of hits.  (Abreu is a member of Delphi whose name appears early in the alphabet; same with Abe and Belle.)  Stanič appears to have been a member of Delphi between about 1997 and 2000, and of Belle starting in 2001.  If you examine papers by the collaboration in the relevant date range, you will find Stanič's name on the author list.  Some of these papers have been cited hundreds of times.  But again, I don't know how one judges the contributions of individual coauthors.  Being on a series of papers with thousands of citations doesn't necessarily mean you're notable if you're one of hundreds of coauthors. Will Orrick (talk) 05:11, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, I can see the problem. I think it up to the proponents of the paper to prove notability to the satisfaction of editors. It seems that little independent achievement outside the team has been demonstrated. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:42, 29 March 2011 (UTC).


 * Delete. These papers are on Google Scholar and have been cited. A 'better' search is not difficult: searching for "S Stanič" as an author finds 309 papers and gives him an h-index around 30. Quite a nice illustration of the dangers of a simplistic interpretation of citation indices, however: I checked the most highly-cited ones, which each have well over a hundred authors and arise from the Belle Collaboration, an international collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers (if you believe Wikipedia). Normalizing h by a divisor reflecting the average number of co-authors (as Hirsch suggested in his original paper) would seem likely to give a quotient in single figures and hence provide little or no evidence that he might satisfy the first criterion of WP:ACADEMIC. Neither did I see anything in the GNews & GBooks results that would constitute significant coverage in independent reliable sources to meet WP:GNG. Qwfp (talk) 09:04, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this helpful input. A search for "author:Samo Stanič" gives far fewer. I agree with your conclusions. Xxanthippe (talk) 09:41, 29 March 2011 (UTC).


 * Delete. According to the Web of Science, the papers that he has co-authored have been cited over 11,000 times and he has an h-index of 52 (BTW again showing that WoS is much more reliable in this sort of thing than GS). Normally, these figures would lead to a snowball keep based on WP:PROF #1. However, I expressed my concerns about this article already a while ago (here). As others already point out above, this huge productivity/citation record is caused by his participation in a few huge project, but he seems to have been only a minor player in them. So in this case, the citation record is not decisive. I see nothing else that would go some way to meeting one of the other criteria of WP:ACADEMIC. --Crusio (talk) 10:06, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Delete. This is a good example of how simplistic h-index or other methods of citation counting can be. In such a case as this the best thing to do, in the absence of sources demonstrating a pass of the general notability guideline, is to go with the judgement of the subject's university, which hasn't appointed him to a full professorship. Associate professors at the world's top universities may sometimes be notable, but I don't think that the University of Nova Gorica falls into that category. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Nobody suggests that citation data should be interpreted simplisticly. The data need the careful examination that has been given in this AfD and which has revealed the true state of affairs. Maybe a sentence needs to be added to WP:Prof to alert to the not very common situation of large research groups. Xxanthippe (talk) 21:45, 1 April 2011 (UTC).


 * Delete. Concur with above: numerous papers, for which there's no demonstrable evidence of significant scholarly contribution. Two of these papers listed on WoS show an "S Stanic" as first author, but they are from the late 1980s, which is about 10 years prior to when this Stanic earned his PhD – presumably a different person. Would probably be OK if some other accompanying work that can specifically be credited to him could be found, but none seems to exist. Agricola44 (talk) 20:30, 1 April 2011 (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.