Whos the Worlds Most Creative Physicist?
Tracking the patterns of influence and prestige that accompany the publication of papers in top scientific journals has become a key to hiring, promotion, and making grants in the sciences, as The Chronicle noted in an October 2005 article. Publishing work in the most prestigious journals—including Science and Nature— carries a numeric value (created by Thomson Scientific, the company that compiles that data). The value is used to rank the importance and “impact” of a scientific article. That number—the “impact factor”—is now used across a wide range of scientific endeavors to evaluate not only work, but individual scientists as well. As the impact factor increases in importance, the next logical step is determining which individual scientists have the most impact. José Soler, a Spanish statistical physicist, has completed just such a ranking for his discipline, the online news-site PhysicsWeb reports. Mr. Soler came up with his rankings by determining the number of references that a g
