Science Proves Isaac Newton Doesn't Even Break Into Top 8,000 All Time Greatest Scientists

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.

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