Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mehrdad Shahshahani

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. Jayjg ^(talk) 03:01, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Mehrdad Shahshahani

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I suspect this one may fail WP:PROF. I only found 20 publications on MathSciNet over a period of more than 30 years, citation counts are: 70,56,31,6,6,6,5,5,1,1,1. Ray^Talk 19:17, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. -- Ray^Talk 19:17, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. I was afraid that you overlooked Comp Sci papers because of the Vision group thing, but he has only 3 papers in DBLP [1]. Pcap ping 20:07, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. The MathSciNet citation numbers are actually more impressive than they seem. MathSciNet citation data is very incomplete for now: they only include References/Bibliography sections for some journals (but probably less than a half of the math journals), and only from about 1995 onwards. Citations in other journals, older citations and citations in books, conference proceedings etc are not counted at all. The better cited papers (70 and 56) are from 1981 and 1994; for a 1981 paper 70 recent journal citations is not bad at all. GoogleScholar[2] give top citation hits of 228, 134, 96, 94, 52, ... He did not publish a lot, but the published papers are in pretty good journals, e.g. American Journal of Mathematics, Duke Mathematical Journal (particularly impressive, this is quite an elite journal), International Mathematics Research Notices, etc. So this is a serious mathematician. However, the five most highly cited papers are all joint with Persi Diaconis, a famous mathematician. For papers without Diaconis the citation hits are much lower. There is nothing else directly to point to, e.g. awards, journal editorships, significant invited talks etc (at least I did not find such info after a bit of google-searching). So overall, there does not seem to be enough here for passing WP:PROF. I may be inclined to make an exception on the grounds of rectifying geographical and cultural bias, but I would still like to see something more tangible than just the citation data. Nsk92 (talk) 20:12, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Weak delete. As Nsk92 says, a few of his publications have good citations, but it's hard to find anything that distinguishes his own contributions in them because they're all with the clearly more notable Diaconis. So I'm not seeing a convincing case for WP:PROF #1 and I don't see what other reason there might be for keeping. And in any case there seems to be very little we can write about him (although he has taught at Stanford, not just in Iran). —David Eppstein (talk) 22:21, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. David makes a good point – all the top-cited papers were with Persi Diaconis, who was always the first author. More problematic is the fact that all of his papers together only show h = 7 (WoS) and he looks to be first author on only about 4 of the 23 total papers. I would say that the low citation impact, coupled with the difficulty in ascertaining what his actual level of contribution to this work was makes it difficult to vote to keep. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:37, 27 January 2010 (UTC).[reply]
- I don't think you can infer anything from author ordering: this is an area where they are usually listed alphabetically. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:59, 28 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  - Often true, but not always. Here, the author lists for about a quarter of his multi-author journal papers are specifically not in alphabetical order and in each instance, someone else is listed as the corresponding author. Of the remaining ones that happen to be in alphabetical order, he is not the corresponding author on another 13 of those, including all of the highly-cited papers with Diaconis. In fact, he seems to be the primary or principal author on only 5 publications listed in WoS, one of which is actually just an editorial. So, I think there is in fact a serious issue (doubt, more precisely) about his specific level of contribution and impact. I would say this simply underscores what you said up above. Respectfully, Agricola44 (talk) 15:59, 28 January 2010 (UTC).[reply]
Delete, does not meet WP:PROF. Abductive (reasoning) 22:13, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Keep A few (more than enough) of his papers have high citations in Google scholar and they are some of the good contributions in the filed of research he chose. Also he has authored with a notable Persi Diaconis. Neither I'm an Iranian nor I knew him. I donot get it why you are trying to delete such mathematicians (has been in the field since 70's and has made substntial contributions in his field). One of his papers on Eigenvalues is very interesting one.--DoNotTellDoNotAsk (talk) 00:08, 31 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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.

Mehrdad Shahshahani

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