Top Scientists - by Christian Spreafico

INTRO

How can we measure the impact of the most important scientists on our society?
Many factors can be considered: industrial applications, scientific prizes, etc

One of them is the analysis of their relevance in the scientific community, that is the number of citations that their publications obtained by other researchers

Among the tools for monitor the citations, Google Scholar is the most complete and updated

In this study the Top Scientists have been compared on the basis of the indixes of this tool

ENJOY!

STEP 0

Building the graph

The graph consider the Quality of the Scientists' publications (X axis) and the time from their birth (Y axis)

Obviously all the considered scientists are geniuses. Their works have numbers that the great part of the researchers in the world could never imagine

BUT, by combining the two measures the Top Scientists can be divided into four provocative categories:

GENIUSES: have many citations in short period. Despite their young age, they are already points of reference for the scientific community

FAMOUSES FOR: have many citations in long period, many of them after several years from their death. For this reason they are considered the gurus in their field of research

WRITERS: are young with not so many citations. If their works will be appreciated they could become the future Gurus. At the moment they have "just" wrote a lot, but they have received "little"

"SIMPLY" OLD: are the ancients that collected their citations in a long time. They are generally not known as the Gurus, at least by public opinion

STEP 1

Considering the total number of the citations

The quality of a scientist Q_i considers the ratio between her/his total citations and the highest number of personal citations in the pool

Q_i

Cit_i

Cit_max

STEP 2

Considering the number of good publications

The quality of a scientist Q_i also considers the ratio between her/his h-index h_i and the highest personal h-index in the pool h_max

The h-index is defined as the maximum value of h such that the given author/journal has published h papers that have each been cited at least h times

Q_i

Cit_i

Cit_max

h_i

h_max

STEP 3

Considering the impact of the citations from the best publication

The quality of a scientist Q_i also considers the ratio between the number of citations of her/his best paper BP_i and the highest personal number of citations the most cited best paper in the pool BP_max

Q_i

Cit_i

Cit_max

h_i

h_max

BP_i

BP_max

STEP 4

Considering the lifetime of the scientists

The quality of a scientist Q_i also considers the ratio between her/his lifetime LT_i and the highest lifetime in the pool LT_max

Cit_i

Cit_max

h_i

h_max

BP_i

BP_max

LT_i

LT_max

METHODOLOGY

The scientists have been selected on the basis of their storical relevance (e.g. prizes, important discoveries) and their high evaluation parameters (i.e. citations, h-index) according to Google Scholar, both absolute and relative to their field of research, for which the labels of Google Scholar have been used.

Points ordinates on time axis (y) are places according to a logaritmic transformation y = Log{[(Year-Year_min)/(Year_max - Year_min)]+1}^1.25, in order to divide the time axis on the basis of the average lifespan (80 years).
This assumption better discriminate the younger researchers because of the increasing in the number of annual citations during the career, and it restricts the older in order to consider the decreasing in the number of citations in the most ancient periods.

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SOURCES

Google Scholar, Wikipedia, webometrics.info

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