From Science Is Not The Answer Substack
Issac Newton was the greatest scientist. The calculus, mechanics, gravity, thermodynamics, astronomy, optics, the binomial theorem, even theology! You name it, Newton was there, looming over all of us.
“No way, Briggs. I checked. Newton only has an h-index of 70, whereas the great Richard Dawkins has an index of 83, and 83 is greater than 70, even without calculus.”
H-index?
“Yes. It’s a quantification of the amazingness of scientists. It’s a hard number, a solid metric, beloved of scientists and hiring committees, that quantifies their worth. Think of it like IQ.”
How’s it calculated?
“For any scientist, count the number of his papers that have been cited by other papers at least h times. An h-index of 10 means a scientist has at least 10 papers that have been cited at least 10 times each.”
So Dawkins has 83 papers that have been cited at least 83 times, whereas Newton has 13 fewer. And that makes Dakwins the superior scientist?
“It does. Numbers do not lie, as they say.”
Anybody better than Dawkins?
“Oh, many. I only picked him because everybody knows him and he’s been in the news recently. Dawkins is ackshually pretty low. There’s an Official List, you know. Or you should have known before you went spouting off about who was the Best Evah. It’s called the AD Scientific Index, and ranks all scientists by their h-index.”
Naturally, I’m curious, and of course always willing to be corrected. Who do they say is the top scientist, if not Newton?
“Alberto Ruiz Jimeno. Has an h-index of a whopping 348, putting your Newton to shame.”
Well, I’m ashamed to say I had never heard of Jimeno, God bless him, who, I take at your word, must be a great scientist.
“His most famous paper, cited by over 14,000 other papers, is ‘The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC‘.”
That I remember. That CMS is the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN. Those CERN guys are always churning out papers. Many have dozens, even hundreds, of authors. Makes you wonder who’s doing the actual writing.
And—hang on—I notice at the top of the Index site you tout there is a button to “List without CERN…” Maybe they know about CERN’s paper factory.
“Doesn’t matter. Ignore CERN. There are still an enormous number of scientists better than your Newton. Take Ronald C Kessler, who has an h-index of 336. He’s a psychiatrist, has nothing to do with CERN. His top paper is ‘Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication’, cited by over 36,000 other papers.”
Ah, the National Comorbidity Survey, another paper generator, maybe even more efficient than AI. How about more ordinary brilliance. Not just paper count, but the work itself. Who else has h-index values around Newton’s?
“I have to admit I don’t know. That AD Index lists 1,604,605 scientists, but they stop displaying the database at an h-index of 100. Those below don’t show.”
A hundred? That’s still higher than Newton, even Dawkins. Who’s the last in the list that does show?
“Horace Loh, from the University of Minnesota. He has an h-index of 100. His most cited paper, which only has three authors, is ‘Molecular mechanisms and regulation of opioid receptor signaling’.”
Sounds like it could be of interest. To somebody, anyway. Yet would you say it ranked right up there with the invention of The Calculus?
“Well, maybe not.”
According to that AD Index there’s something like 8,250 or so scientists with h-indexes of 100 or greater, all better or more worthy to be called The Best than Newton. If we decide h-index is a useful metric of worthiness.
“I guess so.”
If the criterion of goodness is money, which is not a bad argument to make, given science is now an enterprise, then h-index is the way to go. The h-index still has low correlation with real value about knowledge of the world, though. But even if we accept money, the h-index doesn’t account for the number of working scientists, which only seems to increase, thus boosting everybody’s index through time.
The small, independent man who publishes little but with each work being a gem would score low. Ignoring the absolute bottom tier of scientists, the h-index functions more like an inversion of real value.
But it does account for this curious paper Anon suggested to me. “Google Scholar is manipulatable“, by Hazem Ibrahim and others. Some unscrupulous scientists are now buying citations to boost their h-indexes.
From the Abstract:
Citations are widely considered in scientists’ evaluation. As such, scientists
may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature
has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether
scientists can purchase citations…Intrigued by a citation boosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the
service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50
citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be
bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.
You have to laugh.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: $WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.
Scientists are doing great harm to the scientific community.
According to Microsoft Academic Graph, Einstein has an h-index of 67, and Higgs 8. RIP Peter W. Higgs, 1929-2024, Nobel Physics Laureate of boson fame.
Charles Darwin’s any/all time Google Scholar h-index is 92. Fellow 19th century giants Pasteur, Faraday and Maxwell might not be that lucky.
Ernest Rutherford has an h-index of 19, although his 1911 paper, “The scattering of α and β particles by matter and the structure of the atom”, has 929 citations. Good to know that discovering the atomic nucleus has been cited that often.
I guess 19 is pretty good for a New Zealander at U. of Manchester.
Part of the problem is the dramatic increase in the number of papers being written in recent years.
How many papers per year were being written in Newton’s time, vs today?
Also, the “H” index appears to only count direct attributions. If I write a paper and give an attribution to another paper, shouldn’t some note be made of the attributions of that paper as well? Without those attributions, the paper I’m giving an attribute to, wouldn’t even exist.
And what about the attributions on those papers?
Right on Mark! Actually, since knowing who is citing an author is a value judgment, there should be an option to subtract one or many more citations from the cited author. E.g. if Nye the Science Guy cites an author, there should be an app that would zero such an author.
Mark W–Your thoughtful question about credit due for citations of citations, no doubt citations of citations of citations of citations, etc. Citations all the way down! This is not new, something called Impact Factors that are common if not universal in ‘Scientific’ journals finally exposed. Note that multiple authors are, well, multiplied, four used to be considered excessive. Incompetent, Peter Principal type administrators at least are required to be able to count or at least ask their computer to do so.
Journals brag about their Impact Factors, some have other bragging points but am still looking for quality control. Nevertheless, I have been critical of the politicization of Sigma Xi, but passing president should be allowed to run the place, maybe now available for higher positions that require abscissions. Society does need clarification.
https://www.sigmaxi.org/news/keyed-in/post/keyed-in/2024/04/11/passing-the-torch
“But today’s highly competitive landscape has culminated in the creation of a new kind of scientist: the accomplished technician who seemingly publishes a new paper every 37 hours. Such successes—or maybe we should call them abscesses—indicate not so much that certain individuals have mastered the publish-or-perish game, but rather that the standard that society has set for scientists is no longer tenable.”
Foote could not get her work published in the male dominated scientist era.
She had at least two papers published, including the GHE paper. They were even read at AAAS conferences, but by a man.
How about Einstein, A?
I gave his h-index, ie 67 in the Microsoft method.
My stab at Top Ten Scientists, in chronological order. Most could probably agree on about half of them:
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Faraday, Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell, Einstein.
Candidates from the rest of 20th and so far 21st century might include Rutherford, Planck, Curie, Bohr, Pauling and Strassmann, Hahn or Meitner.
Had Oregonian Pauling looked at Franklin’s X-ray crystalography of DNA on a visit to England, he’d have scooped Watson and Crick, as they feared would happen. A member of his team did see them, but didn’t appreciate their significance. Pauling’s passport had briefly been revoked due to his suspected Communist sympathies, but it was reinstated in time for him to have beaten the US/UK Cambridge upstarts.
Pauling also would have made the key breakthrough on the implosion bomb had he acccepted real Commie Oppie’s offer to head the chemistry department at Los Alamos. They had been friends and collaborators in CA until Oppie hit on Mrs. Pauling, whom Linus met at what is now Oregon State. Ukrainian explosives expert George Kistiakowski achieved what Pauling would have.
I would place Newton higher in your list. He actually came up with a method (Newton’s Method) to solve Kepler’s equation. Realize that the general “two-body” problem can’t be solved–there are only ten integrals available and twelve are required. What’s solved is the modified two-body problem where one body is much larger and is held fixed. This gives us a closed-form solution involving conic sections. The timing requires one to solve Kepler’s equation, and there’s no closed form solution of that equation. Genius is not something that can be quantified by silly H-indices.
I listed them chronologically, not by importance.
I would include Brahe, Boole and Babbage in that section.
plus Turing and von Neumann.
Tycho and Kepler are a duality; the former gathered the data the latter used to discover elliptical orbits. Mars was the ideal subject, with an orbit more elliptical than usual, thanks to its proximity to Jupiter.
The others you mention are more mathematicians or rngineers than scientists. Unless you consider “computer science” to be science.
That seems a fair assessment. Meticulous data collection is too often undervalued.
Mathematicians, yes. Engineers, not so much.
They did formulate much of the theoretical base of modern computing.
Granted, none of it was what used to be regarded as Natural Philosophy.
Computer Science deserves the “science” far more than any other field which has “science” in its name, but that is rather a low bar.
To be fair, most of CS is more akin to Engineering, but with less rigour.
It probably best fits in the Applied Science category
More than “political science”, but less than “earth science”, “life science” or “physical science”.
Computer science began as mechanical engineering, but now is electrical engineering. Software development is also arguably engineering, but IMO more akin to mathematics or logic.
IMO, sciences are astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc, ie the hard sciences. “Climate science”, as opposed to climatology, however is just computer gaming, badly done.
Some of the basic hard sciences intersect, as in paleontology, meteorology, oceanography, etc. Then there are the applied sciences, like medicine and industrial chemistry.
It’s always difficult to decide just how to categorise things.
Using a biology analogy, “earth sciences”, “life sciences” and “physical sciences” (the plurals are intentional) are Orders or Families, whereas Computer Science is a Genus.
Some aspects of CS did, basically the hardware sub-branch.
Babbage’s contribution was principally in this area.
There’s more than just software development, but, yes, the bulk of CS could be rated as Applied Mathematics.
The underpinnings of modern computing utilise Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT). Turing worked on the limits of computability, amongst other things.
That’s a matter of categorisation.
As the saying goes, if you could lay out all the economists end to end you wouldn’t reach a conclusion.
As I said, Computer Science fits in this category.
I used to be a great admirer of Einstein but now, not so much.
With respect to his 1905 paper on Special Relativity, I have since learnt that the relativistic ratio (which underpins the whole theory) was discovered by Oliver Heaviside in 1889 when tidying up Maxwell’s equations into the form we know today. He told the Irish mathematician Fitzgerald who, with Lorentz, came up with the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction in the early 1890’s. Lorentz also said that time would slow down as well. Henri Poincare, the greatest French mathematician of his time wrote down the equation Mass=Energy/c2 in 1895, 10 years before Einstein. So why does Einstein get the credit?
In 1915, David Hilbert, the greatest German mathematician of his time, released his paper on General Relativity months before Einstein did. It is interesting the Hilbert invited Einstein to stay with him before either paper was published.
So again, I ask why does Einstein get all the credit?
Heaviside simplified Thomson, not Maxwell. Hasenörhl also anticipated Einstein.
It often happens in the history of science that ideas and insights are in the air, eg Newton and Leibniz and Darwin and Wallace. It doesn’t necessarily mean somebody ripped off another’s work.
You are wrong. Maxwell had 17 equations to describe electromagnetism based on field theory first suggested to him by faraday, but these were written using quaternions and were essentially useless to a practical man like Heaviside. He turned them into 4 equations in vector form so engineers could use them.
Thomson had nothing to do with establishing the then-new theory of electromagnetism.
My point is that these ideas for which Einstein (and his very loud cheer squad) claims credit were known 10-15 years prior.
And the idea that one of the most brilliant mathematicians would pinch ideas from an ex-patents clerk who did only middling well at school and university and not the other way around beggars belief.
Heaviside did indeed rework Maxwell’s equations into the form most often used today, but that’s not his activity most relevant to Einstein, who of course did rely on Maxwell to show Newton wrong.
However Heaviside simplified J. J. Thomson’s electron work, which bore on mass and energy equivalence.
Junk science continues its onward march.
This is scientist index is nothing more than modern-day modeling of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
Junk then.
Junk now.
We’re surrounded by junk science from COVID to Climate.
I think you mean junk modelling, in part.
So what happens when the climate shell game collapses and 97% of the papers failed to replicate what really happened –business as usual – sealevel still long term linear 8″/century, 2100 T° anomaly -1.5°C to +1.5°C, nothing new in flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes … a vast continuation of the Great Planetary Garden of Eden Greening and Plentitude, world population peaking at 8.5- 9B by 2050 and then falling back to today’s ~7.5B.
Wish I could be here.
If that was true, I suppose John Cook would have a very high index although what he published was utter nonsense, not to also mention Thomas Mann and his hockey stick. Also, if Newton’s discoveries were made today, there would be many more journals that would publish them than during his lifetime. That’s really comparing apples and oranges … As mentioned, truly laughable.
Sorry, Thomas Mann was a great German author of The Magic Mountain and Young Lothar. Michael Mann is an American mediocrity and fraud who published the Hockey Stick climate reconstruction based on the rings of one tree.
Was it really one tree?
A bristle cone pine as I recall.
And the person who gathered the data specifically said that Bristlecones were not a temperature proxy.
Yes.
You’d think that A.W. Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion” would be required reading for all aspiring “climate scientists”.
No tree is a temperature proxy.
It must have been more than one tree- or did you mean one species? Either way, such a measurement is worthless.
My recollection is that groups of trees were the basis of Dr. Briffa’s paleo proxy sets, but Mann et al decided to cull out all specimens that didn’t produce a hockey-stick like uptick when graphed.
So after all the culling, there was just one lone bristle pine specimen that fitted Man’s purpose.
Looking at the actual Briffa data from 1800, you can see why Mickey had to twist it and truncate it
Nice strong 1940s peak followed by the “new ice age” scare.
The chart shows the highpoint of the 1880’s too.
So we have the Earth’s temperatures climbing from the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-1800’s to the 1880’s, and then a significant cooldown into the Early Twentieth Century, then a warmup to the 1930’s and then a similar cooldown through the 1970’s, and then another warmup beginnig in the 1980’s.
In other words, this chart shows the cyclical nature of the Earth’s climate. It warms for a few decades, and then it cools for a few decades and the highs and lows take place within certain bounds.
It also shows the Earth is not experiencing unprecedented warming as it was just as warm in the past as it is today, and this means that CO2 is a minor player in determining the Earth’s temperatures, since it is no warmer today than it was in the recent past, yet there is more CO2 in the air today (423ppm) compared to the recent past (280ppm).
As I recall is was a subset of something like 34 proxies out of nearly 250 available to him. 6 were the pine trees in California, 1 was a proxy from eastern Canada and the rest were from Siberia.
After he threw away the disagreeable samples and massaged the error bands, he further massaged the graph to eliminate unwanted warming and cooling eras.
But wouldn’t those tree ring data be representative of just the area in which the trees grew? If so, how can one draw conclusions on global scale? And isn’t one of Professor Doctor Mann’s responses to criticism of his Hockey Stick that the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were merely local, and not global, events?
A quantification of the amazingness of scientists.
The Mengele….
Science/worthiness based on the number of views.
Yeah. Got it.
Consensus of another form.
Looks almost like a joke I once heard. Roofers were shingling a roof in a thick fog. It was so thick, they shingled off the edge of the roof and out onto the fog.
My Climate Science
BS Index
Michael “Hockey Stink” Mann
100 for his Tree Ring Circus
The CO2 is 97% Natural Nutters
The Three Stooges pf Climate Science
Moe Berry
99
Larry Salby
99
Curly Harde
99
Koutsoyiannis
98 (The Crazy Greek)
BNasty2000
98 (special needs armchair scientist
I do enjoy reading your ad-homs, Richard. Somewhat quirky some might say.
I wonder what Koutsoyiannis thinks of Greene?
I think we should be told.
“I wonder what Koutsoyiannis thinks of Greene?”
About the same as he would of a 5-year-old child having a tantrum !
Certainly he would feel embarrassed for the parent.
This time I insulted El Nino Nutter BeNasty2000 in my original comment BEFORE he could respond with his usual back biting insult. My new efficiency drive.
At least you called me a scientist…
… something you will never be.
And I guess that wanting you to produce scientific evidence for even the most basic rant-support…
… is something “special”
Based on his written responses to my negative comments on his articles at Climate Etc. and No Tricks Zone (I think), we could never be friends. We are bitter enemas.
I gave K. the benefit of the doubt because he is Greek and so is my wife, but the CO2 is 97% Natural Nutters are too stupid to agree with. They should all be sedated.
Koutsoyiannis’ methods and data are always very clearly laid out, there on his papers waiting for you (or anyone) to refute. So why not skip all this and simply do that? It would be quite the feather in your (or anyone’s) hat.
YAWN.. !
Is that really the best empty rant you can manage.
Same scientific level as Lusername or fungal..
Hey, but at least I got vacant occupancy !! 😉
You do enjoy being contrary to an extraordinary degree. Even to the point of contradicting yourself.
Exactly where did I contradict myself, or are you just flapping your gums?
A BS index gets a down vote?
Strange thing about science is that after a century or two, we can find out whether the theories have passed the test of time
Most of the time, a scientific consensus is wrong — from slightly wrong to completely wrong
Most of the time science advances are from an individual or small team that refutes the existing consensus
That does not mean a consensus is always wrong, or always 100% wrong, as some Nutters here believe
A scientist should be judged partially by how far ahead of his peers he was.
What seems to be brilliant science, such as E=MC2, may someday be found to be false.
In fact, I believe there is already some evidence it is false.
The UFOs that visit this planet must be traveling faster than the speed of light to get here.
How they do it, no one could know based on current science here.
Since the1940s we have had reports of UFOs by tens of thousands of military pilots and radar operators. Videos and photographs too. The UFOs are not all delusions.
Based on the extraordinary maneuvers of these crafts with no wings, the designers could be 1,000 years ahead of us in science. Or even one million years ahead.
The belief that we are the only life in the universe is bizarre, after so much evidence we are not alone.
In 1,000 years, science may be a lot different than today. Today’s geniuses could be found out to have been completely wrong.
But CAGW will still be coming in 10 years
A
R Greene,
It would be better for the progress of proper science if you withdrew in a voluntary manner from writing drivel that you think is science. Children can be harmed by material like this.
Geoff S
He was doing fine for the first 5 paragraphs….
Mr Big Shot scientist knows how to insult me but makes ZERO attempt to refute anything in my comment
Why don’t you create a petition asking Charles to ban my comments here because you do not approve of them?
Must I agree with every conservative and be 100% anti-government to get upvotes here? That seems to work
You asked me to never respond to your comments and I intended to do that.
But you continue to respond to my comments with childish character attacks
I have long comments with plenty of science related sentences for you to cherry pick and try to refute
But that seems to be too much trouble for you, or too difficult?
Just throw down generic character attacks.
Do they make you feel good?
If so, you must have an unhappy life.
Your comment did not contain anything except baseless egotistical opinion.
Unbacked by any science or rational thought.
Nothing to counter..
To paraphrase Dilbert, your comments are “content free.”
“The UFOs that visit this planet must be traveling faster than the speed of light to get here.”
How do you know they haven’t found a way to bend space and time?
I have no idea how they travel long distances and maneuver here at speed beyond human capabilities.
They seem to travel long distances with propulsion methods we do not understand.
There are a number of godlilocks zone planets where there appears to be water that does not freeze or boil
The ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ or habitable zone, is the range of distance with the right temperatures for water to remain liquid. Discoveries in the Goldilocks Zone, like Earth-size planet Kepler-186f, are what scientists hope will lead us to water––and one day life.
“I have no idea”
Just stop there…. and you will be 110% correct !
Well… that was a load of absolute gibberish.
An improvement on some of his other posts though. !
I can count on BNasty to have an opinion, usually wrong, and then ignore all contrary evidence.
That’s how he got to be a
El Nino Nutter
Volcano Nutter
Ther’s no AGW Nutter
There’s no Greenhouse Effect Nutter
CO2 is 97% Naturae Nutter
A quintuple Climate Nutter
Poor RG….
An El Nino Denier
A Volcano denier
An AGW-cult-believer
Doesn’t know what a greenhouse does or how it functions.
Denies CO2 flux is mostly natural.
Doesn’t know what scientific evidence is.
“Or even one million years ahead.”
Or a billion. But our governments that tell us we’re having a climate emergency tell us “nothing to see here folks”.
Re UFOs –
grainy pics often show the saucers banking when they turn.
Why would they need to do that?
There is not one good picture of a UFO. Why is that?
A lot of these UFO’s you see on facebook look a lot like the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame. I have a suspicion most of this UFO imagery is computer-generated cartoons.
That’s not to say I rule out UFO’s as being real. The jury is still out. One good picture or video would go a long way towards establishing that UFO’s are real.
I must say that some of the observations by good pilots are compelling, but I guess I’m going to have to see one for myself before I believe.
I want to see a UFO land on the White House lawn and have Gort go tell Biden that the Galactic Council has determined it’s time for Joe to go into retirement because the Galactic Council supports Trump and thinks it is time to put some sanity in the White House.
Yes, it’s always coming in 10 years from any given date. 🙂
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you’re a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” – Mark Twain
You should follow your own advice
What a clever rejoinder. I’m cut to the quick. No doubt Twain got the same criticism.
First of all, being a UFO does not automatically qualify as extra-terrestrial. They might be, a few, many, all, but just being unidentified is not proof.
Second, OUR physics do not allow us to go faster than the speed of light. OUR physics do not provide a artificial gravity or anti-gravity. There is much we do not know. For all we know any ET space craft is a multi-generational vehicle that took a very long time to arrive. We do not know.
We do not have evidence of other life in the universe. We have hints and inferences, yes, but not proof. Yet.
As we study the climate we are becoming more and more aware of just how lucky our planet is – for our form of life.
Probabilities suggest other life bearing planets, but probabilities are just probabilities.
And I agree. The CAGW goal posts will continue to move and the precipice will still be 10 years in the future, even by 2050.
“As we study the climate we are becoming more and more aware of just how lucky our planet is – for our form of life.”
Humanity is in the “sweet spot”.
Life is either very rare, or is all over the place in the universe.
If we find life in an underground ocean on one of the moons of our solar system, then that will mean that life occurs whereever the circumstances are right.
Thinking about life on other planets and space travel, it is interesting to speculate on what kind of life would manage to progress to the point that it could get into orbit and move around in space.
Beings who develop space travel would necessarily be small creatures, no bigger than human beings, I would think. Large dinosaurs would never to to space, even if they developed rockets because they are too big and heavy.
I think body size is a definite limitation to space travel, barring something like the development of an anti-gravity drive or something similar.
Would beings living entirely in oceans be able to develop space technology? I could see where sea creatures would have the intelligence to understand space travel, but would they have the environment to accomplish such a task?
So if life is abundant in the universe, then it stands to reason that out of the billions of possibilites, there will be some places that develop advanced life forms. Whether they can develop the ability to travel between the stars is the question, but every day we find out how little we know about the universe we live in, even though we know a lot, we have barely scratched the surface of reality. So don’t rule anything out, but don’t rule it in until you see it with your own eyes.
Even if life does exist in many places, it could still be that the circumstances necessary for life to develop from simple single celled creatures to first complex and then intelligent life is much rarer.
After all, there is evidence on this planet that life may have formed with a few hundred million years of the crust cooling. Something like 3.5 billion years ago. However, complex life didn’t show up until about 250 million years ago.
During that time there were 3 or 4 instances where life was almost wiped out.
I do not comprehend the down votes. You make agreeable points. Some of your conjectures may prove to be right. As you say, time will tell.
Up voted for the laugh.
You remind us that art is the purest human endeavour.
Science is speculation constrained by reason and observations.
Philosophy is freer. It is speculation constrained only by reason.
But you give us a true work of art. Speculation unconstrained by anything,
I guess Archimedes has an index of 0 along with Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham father of modern optics and cited by Newton?
What about the Arabs who invented the numbers we use today?
The number system was invented in India. It came to Europe via Arabs, so got their name.
Citations for sale? Gen Z is on the HIghway to Hell. Sir Isaac Newton is known for his formula for the force of gravity, but the hidden value of that work is the development of the Inverse Square Law, which is an integral part of almost all physics.
Fizzix? Wots that then?
Hi Matt:
Long time no chat.
Nice reminder that we live in a world where critical thinking and skepticism are more essential than ever.
As someone (I don’t remember who) once said of Zsa Zsa Gabor, “Being married nine times does not necessarily make her the best advertisement for marriage”.
Well if you can buy “carbon” credits, surely buying citations is a shoo-in?
Good for Briggs. It is an impoverished academia when quantity rules over quality. But then we knew that. Ioannidis at Stanford pointed out that over half of all published and peer reviewed biomed papers have unreproducible results. Mann’s centered PCA ‘invention’ produces hockey sticks from red noise, as proven by McIntyre and McKittrick.
“ h-index ”
This seems to be concocted by users of Preparation H™.
Either way, users are gonna take it up the booty.
Science is not a democracy. This metric is absurd
From the article: “The small, independent man who publishes little but with each work being a gem would score low. Ignoring the absolute bottom tier of scientists, the h-index functions more like an inversion of real value.”
I think that makes me feel a whole lot better about my h-index of 6!
97% of all scientists….
Briggs has a lot of good article on a variety of subjects
I check his website every day for a new article
William M. Briggs – Statistician to the Stars! (wmbriggs.com)
What about Stratton?
I wonder, who’s higher on the list, Sheila Jackson Lee or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? That’s a close one…
No worries. You can buy followers on Facebook, Linkedin, X, TicTok, Instagram, Youtube, etc, etc etc. No reason why you shouldn’t buy citations for your Scientific papers.
Markets are created when needs exist. Scientists obviously need citations for their papers to promote their careers.
And of course, it doesn’t say if a citation is made to use the paper, or to show it is absolute trash.
“Ranking Scientists” seems to be a bit silly.
In sports they love to rank players. But none of those rankings take into account things like rule changes, who might have been the best receiver was not because he didn’t have a great passing quarterback. I think Pete Rose still has some records (Hits, etc.) that are attributed to others that didn’t actually break his records.
Jenner didn’t know what a virus was yet he made some observations, put 2 and 2 together. and came up with the first smallpox vaccine.
Where do they rank him?
Scientists should be grouped with engineers, inventors, doctors and all STEM people
They should be judged by how their new knowledge / invention benefitted people and animals
Products and services derived from their knowledge
Electricity
Telephone
TV
Computers
Lasers
Penicillin
Indoor plumbing
Not judged by writing papers that collect dust and do not result in any benefit for humans.