Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/Science and academia/Archive 6

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Should lists of publications aim to be complete?

When I write a biography of an academic I only list major publications rather than all their books, chapters, and papers. I thought there was a guideline that lists of works within biographies were just meant to be summaries; however I can't find this now. MOS:LISTSOFWORKS says "Complete lists of works, appropriately sourced to reliable scholarship (WP:V), are encouraged, particularly when such lists are not already freely available on the internet." which is different from how I thought it works. I see articles like Steven Mithen that have very complete publications lists (and seem disproportionately huge/ list-like as a result). So can I add more publications to the biographies I write or, alternatively, is there an agreed guideline on which selection of an academic's publications to include in their biography? Thanks in advance for any help, MartinPoulter (talk) 13:31, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I think the ambiguity is regarding what is considered notable work or not. For BLP academics, there's risk of vanity/professional promotion attached, whereas for dead academics, we emphasize their top works. Karl_Marx#Selected_bibliography emphasizes works that are article subjects in their own right. All that said, consider WP:OTHERSTUFF. Wikipedia is inherently inconsistent. I'd defer to shorter/more precise list personally ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 14:04, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

• A short (3-5 entries) list, absolutely. That Mithen article needs paring down, and not just the huge list of works, but also all that unsourced text. Lists of works are standard with actors and novelists. However, many of those movies and novels will be notable in their own right. Unfortunately, even an obscure movie is more likely to receive coverage than scientific works. Please see this AfD for a discussion on a similar topic. --Randykitty (talk) 17:32, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

A short list of greatest hits, which for some will be over 5 entries. Unfortunately different rates of citation between fields, and historical issues, make it tricky to specify a level of citations, but it should be high, bearing in mind age and the research area. Reviews written should rarely be needed, unless they provoked some storm. See also the "Displaying publications on Academic pages as tables vs bullet lists" section near the top of the page. Johnbod (talk) 18:07, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Randykitty and Johnbod: these lists should be very selective. I think the MOSTLISTOFWORKS guidance for complete lists of works is aimed at novelists and musicians, and was not written with academics in mind. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:22, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I also agree. I tend to think over 10 entries in a single sub-section definitely warrants trimming, unless it is a case of "lists are not already freely available on the internet" with more historical biographies. Especially with journal papers, which personally I aim for closer to 5. Full authored books I'd give more weight to, less so chapters or edited volumes. MOSTLISTOFWORKS probably needs a revision to accomodate academics more. -Kj cheetham (talk) 18:43, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Some really major figures could warrant a few more. I brought Ronald Graham up to Good Article status with a list of publications that includes 19 research papers, for instance (still a small fraction of his total works). But they are all justified in the text of the article, for instance as independently notable topics for which Graham was one of the main contributors, or topics that other people ended up naming after Graham. I wanted a shorter list but couldn't justify omitting any of them. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:05, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

The key bit to that to me is them being justified in the text, so they are more like references than a standalone list. -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:11, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

David Eppstein: Exactlly my point below. And if you can't manage to cut a list, I know for sure that the articles are essential to mention! Rublamb (talk) 19:28, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

That paragraph in MOS:LISTOFWORKS begins, Lists of published works should be included for authors, illustrators, photographers and other artists. So, yes, it's pretty clearly meant with artists in mind. Applying it to scholars and academics generally doesn't make much sense. XOR'easter (talk) 19:24, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

I would argue that scholars who publish a lot of books and papers count as authors. That doesn't mean I think the existing text of MOS:LISTOFWORKS should apply to scholars, but I do mean that it's natural for a Wikipedia editor to read it as applying to them, and thus we need a clarification or a dedicated guideline. MartinPoulter (talk) 10:22, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Interesting discussion. I think a complete list of books would be worthwhile to include for all. However, since a list of journal articles and chapters in a book can be very long, that does seem excessive to include in an encyclopedic article for most academics. A really long publication list also makes it difficult for the average reader to know which papers are important and which are minor--although this can be specified in the text. But it also depends on the person. A select few are important enough to have a separate article that lists all of their publications. Some individuals cross over, being both academics and writers, poets, or musicians. Rublamb (talk) 18:46, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I meant papers etc. Completeness is fine for books, as we do for other types of author. Johnbod (talk) 18:49, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

"Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, but a digital encyclopedia project. Other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page, there is no practical limit to the number of topics Wikipedia can cover, or the total amount of content."

I'm favor an approach based on Inclusionism on this, and have a dissenting opinion from most of what is here. Having had lists of peer-reviewed publications deleted in the past, I've avoided creating them to avoid conflict. However I personally believe that academic pages have been done a disservice by the project by not including their bibliography, and that the fear of pages appearing to be "vanity/professional promotion" is detrimental to the project overall. Once an individual is shown to be notable, their individual publications don't all need to be notable enough to have their own article. Making that judgment call to include one over another in itself is almost original research in my opinion. Citation counts are a really bad metric to determine the importance of an article, and these are not the same for every discipline. The existence of lists on places like Google Scholar is not a reason to avoid creating them here, as we can not be sure such services will always exist. In 5, 10, or 20 years, the Wikipedia list may be the best one available for a particular academic.

The users for an academic biography are likely to be other academics, and comprehensive lists of publications can help guide someone in a literature review. Treating academics differently then other authors, musicians, or poets is ridiculous. Peer-reviewed publications are often counted more heavily then academic text books for academics as well when it comes to their professional reviews and promotion. The journal articles are often the real product of what makes them impactful, with textbooks and others being something on the side. A graduate student reading up on a researcher for a thesis is unlikely to care about a textbook written for undergrads, but a publication with 30 citations from 1972 might be helpful.

Having pages for authors, illustrators, photographers, and other artists that can include comprehensive lists of their work should definitely include academics who are notable for their publications. Why wouldn't it? Peer-reviewed publications are the gold standard for Wikipedia sources, why do books get more attention then articles on a researchers page? If the list gets to large, it can be turned into a list article like what was done for Albert Einstein. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 03:11, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

GeogSage: I appreciate your thoughts about being consistent across all articles in Wikipedia. Certainly, that would be ideal. However, academics have different criteria for notability, so these articles are already treated differently. Since published articles are a part of the criteria that help many of these individuals meet notability, it makes sense that there is concern about making someone seem unduly significant with an overly long list of publications. That is, sometimes an individual is a prolific writer but neither their articles nor their research is very significant. However, a long list of articles published in B-tier journals could make such an individual look more important than they are, especially to the average reader. I think students, potential students, and people conducting research are also likely users of these articles and may not have the background to know which journals are notable. Envision an article with two or three sentences about an academic with a list of fifty or more articles. Can you see how this might lead a reader to assume this person is very important or even a leader in their field? But, as I said above, it still depends on the individual academic as to whether or not a long list is appropriate. Rublamb (talk) 04:38, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

From my understanding, notability when it comes to academics, and what is included in an article are different things.

Once an academic has has passed verification as notable, why does it matter if we make them seem "more significant" then they really are? A list of articles that is verifiable has utility to some, and if it is accurate then there isn't an issue. If we give the same treatment to all academics, this is not a problem. It really seems like academic Wikipedia articles are being limited in ways others are not, simply out of concern that researchers may be given to much representation. If the content is verifiable, and notable, then it is acceptable. There isn't a practical limit on the amount of content we can include for completeness.

Peer reviewed publications in lower tier journals are still incredibly valuable. While Nature and Science are great, for niche topics you'll probably want to explore smaller journals focused on the topic. If these are predatory publications, that is another discussion entirely. Many academic journals have Wikipedia pages, linking to them could help someone check on the publication. Regardless, if the information is accurate, us weighing in on how important an academic should look is not a neutral point of view. If we excluded legitimate journals with "lower" impact factors, then it would be very hard to source anything at all on Wikipedia. Songs, poems, and books get included with artists. Academics publish journals. Why delete accurate and verifiable content just because other pages with academics exist with less complete coverage?

In answer to your hypothetical: Obviously, prose is the best over lists wherever possible, so an author with 50 publications could probably have at least a paragraph discussing topics of focus, where they went to school, their degrees, and academic positions they held. If those three points aren't available at all in outside sources, it would be hard for them to pass basic notability criteria for academics anyway. It would probably be pretty easy to set an upper limit to the number of publications before it is worth splitting into a separate list article. But for an academic with clear notability, including all of their publications only increases overall utility for some users. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:54, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

I would argue that in most cases, including all publications decreases the utility of a Wikipedia article, by filling the listing with chaff that makes it much harder for readers to find which ones might be important. Doing so would also strongly encourage WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY, which we should be discouraging, because who but the subject would care to keep a constantly-changing listing of hundreds of publications up-to-date? —David Eppstein (talk) 08:28, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

I really like Scholia as a tool for exploring/finding ALL publications by an academic. And would prefer that Wikipedia presents their most important works, which may be niche as others said here. You can include the Wikidata item of any academic and attach it in external link https://scholia.toolforge.org/author/ ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:13, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

You can simply add {{Scholia|author}} to the "external links" section of an article. Personally, I think that GScholar is the most complete database, as it covers all subjects and all journals (even predatory ones...). Beware that it's vulnerable to manipulation, as shown by the case of Ike Antkare :-) --Randykitty (talk) 14:05, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

The existence of outside databases of sources does not guarantee they will exist forever. Link rot is a real problem, and many of these indexes are controlled by private companies, and can be put behind a pay wall, or dramatically altered at any point. It can be really hard already to find publications from authors from the 1980s, by putting together lists now, we could potentially help users in the 2050s. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 16:57, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Deciding which articles are important or not important in most cases will be case by case. What is unimportant to one will be incredibly important to someone doing a thesis on that exact topic. Not to be a broken record, but organizing the sources in tables would make it easier to sort and explore them. Could a JavaScript link for the number of citations or impact factor be made, if one doesn't already exist? Failing that, the number could just be included and dated with the article.

I don't think we should limit content people can include into bios out of fear that it might cause some to write autobiographies. While it can be a problem, I don't think it should be considered in terms of policy on content to include. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:03, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Listing academic papers just like movies would only be "consistent" if an academic paper really were like a movie. XOR'easter (talk) 14:29, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Well put. Even a movie that flops will be seen by thousands of people and probably still get a few reviews (if only to say that it was crap). An academic article that gets read by thousand people would be a smash hit and only garner some citations, but certainly no reviews dedicated just to that particular article. --Randykitty (talk) 14:57, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Once the academic is verified as notable, if someone wants to make an accurate list of their papers then I don't see an issue. Not every publication needs to be independently notable if it was written by a notable subject. Movies are not academic articles. Most Hollywood movies can get their own entire Wikipedia article alone. Movies, poems, songs, and various other creative works can be included on an artists biography. Why wouldn't a notable academic get a biography? The fact movies get more viewers doesn't really matter, because academic journals are not movies. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:09, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

Making an accurate list of all publications can be quite nontrivial. In my own case, for instance, Google Scholar lists roughly 400 publications, my cv lists roughly 500, and DBLP lists 675. I know DBLP is missing some, but it also groups things as "the same publication" differently than those other sources. Which is the accurate one? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:40, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

This is definitely a challenge. I would say that a list should be able to include the verifiable publications that an editor is willing to track down. Journal articles, book chapters, and textbooks can be considered separately. The least accurate thing to do would be excluding all or most of them. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:45, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

"Once an academic has has passed verification as notable, why does it matter if we make them seem "more significant" then they really are?" Because the purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform, not to misinform. XOR'easter (talk) 15:40, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

"The users for an academic biography are likely to be other academics" — as an academic, I can honestly say that I have never wanted a complete list of any living scholar's publications in their Wikipedia article. WP:NOTCV. XOR'easter (talk) 23:19, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

As an aspiring academic (grad student), I have wanted this.

My general approach to literature is to find out a few key papers on the topic I'm researching using a key word search, and then note the authors, journals, and works cited in those papers. Then I go through the authors publications to see if they have published anything else I'm interested, and repeat the process for people they cited. Over time, I can build up a good idea of what journals often publish content on the exact topic I'm interested in and will look through their catalogs. When I'm looking at concepts, I try to pinpoint the first article that mentioned in and then summarize the discussion around it.

Finding well curated versions of these lists is often more challenging then you'd think, and I'm thankful that I can often find the professors CV to help. Failing that, ResearchGate and Google Scholar profiles are okay, but not great. If the researcher predates the internet, this can be exceptionally challenging, especially as Emeritus faculty often have their CVs taken off their faculty websites.

A lot of the pages I've made start as notes for my research. The thing I've wanted to do but really can't based on the limits imposed is linking coauthors together so that a user could jump between the bibliographies of authors that have published together. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:59, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

A proper subject-specific bibliographic database like DBLP or zbMATH can do all this and doesn't require editors to continue paying attention to keeping the material up-to-date. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Existence of outside services is not really justification for limiting the scope of the project. These services are not likely to be around forever, so redundancy would be important. Not every discipline has such an bibliography. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:13, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia is also WP:NOTDATABASE though. -Kj cheetham (talk) 20:20, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

You're right, but lists of publications for notable academics are not indiscriminate collection of information. Comprehensive publication lists exist for creators in other disciplines, so this isn't unprecedented. They exist for many academics as well. Looking at other pages for inspiration, I view Albert Einstein's page as the gold standard for Academic biographies. On the main page, there are "Publications," followed by a list article containing tables for all of his publications titled List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein. If a researcher is noteworthy enough to have a Wikipedia page, and their publication list is to extensive to fit on one page, I don't see why that would be discouraged. More importantly, why are textbooks more generally accepted for inclusion in a list then journal articles, the gold standard and main product for many researchers?

This Wikiproject seems to lean very heavily on the side of excluding verifiable noteworthy content out of fear it may be vanity or promotional content. This is making it harder to write comprehensive and good articles for academics that are useful to people interested in reading about those academics. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 21:14, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Albert Einstein is a very bad example. The vast majority of subjects of academic biographies here are far less prominent than Einstein. Because of his prominence, all of his publications have been put under a microscope for many decades; that is not true of most academics. When we discuss general standards for how thoroughly to list the publications of academics, those standards should be set with typical academics in mind, not Einstein. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Very, very few academics warrant a multi-page treatment like Albert Einstein. He is not a typical case, being as he was Albert Einstein. XOR'easter (talk) 21:43, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

A very rough rule of thumb: if a scholar's work has been published in a series of edited volumes (The Complete Works of So-and-So), then it might be reasonable to have a full-page, comprehensive bibliography for them. XOR'easter (talk) 21:50, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Such a service definitely should exist, but that doesn't mean that Wikipedia should provide it. I draw an analogy with external links; it's useful for people to have a guide to the most useful educational web links for a topic, but that doesn't mean that all those links should be in the Wikipedia article, and in fact it's better for a lot of reasons if "External links" sections have very few links. Wikipedia is just one open knowledge project with a particular scope; it's not trying to serve every kind of need. MartinPoulter (talk) 10:25, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I think this needs to be decided on a case by case basis. For scientists who worked in the good old days when you only wrote papers when you had something substantial to say, and the rare people who can still do that, then a complete bibliography is the same as a list of their significant publications But in the vast majority of cases I agree that it overwhelms the article (most biographies of academics are short) and is better left to dedicated bibliographic databases, including our sister projects Wikidata/Scholia. – Joe (talk) 15:52, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree this could be viewed on a case by case basis, but reject the idea of "the good old days" being superior to current research. For example, they had a much lower bar for citations needed. There are unique problems now, and there were problems then. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 22:01, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Marian Breland Bailey

Marian Breland Bailey has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Spinixster (chat!) 10:09, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Elisabeth Burgos-Debray#Requested move 5 March 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Elisabeth Burgos-Debray#Requested move 5 March 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Kiwiz1338 (talk) 12:11, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Lists of publications: advice

I've looked through the older discussions on how to approach bibliographic sections ([1] [2]), it appears that there's no hard policy on this topic (I couldn't find one), so I'd ask for some advice here. A useful thing I've noticed on German Wikipedia is that the editors take care to link the scans of books and articles if they're public domain or under a similar open license, e.g. de:August Leskien. Is this desirable on en.wp too? I've done that at Vatroslav Jagić and Atanasije Stojković (the latter having a mixture of fictional and scientific content). In the former article I also regularly included translations of the work-titles in brackets, as the scholar barely published in English, although I'm not sure if such data is truly needed (whoever knows the language and would wish to find and read the original book can understand the title anyway), and it might take up too much space. What is the best approach here? — Phazd (talk|contribs) 00:42, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Dr. Catherine Emihovich

Hello everybody!

I recently have been edited the page on Catherine Emihovich all by myself. Any help would be appreciated as I don't have much experience with wikipedia. If you were wondering she was the 12th Dean at the University of florida. I went to their talk page but it shut down. Once again anything is appreciated. Shane emihovich (talk) 19:18, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Shane emihovich, this page doesn't seem very active, you could ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red as they are usually helpful with editing women's biography articles. Also your username suggests that you may have a conflict of interest in editing the article, there is already some advice about this on your talk page. TSventon (talk) 15:37, 14 April 2024 (UTC)