The Science Hall of Fame
Building a pantheon of scientists from Wikipedia and Google Books
On 14 January 2011, Science, one of the world's most prominent scientific journals, published a "Science Hall of Fame" (SHoF),[1] which they described as "a pantheon of the most famous scientists of the past 2 centuries". Unlike in traditional assessment of "fame" and "influence", which usually relies on polls and the opinion of experts in the field, Science has opted for an objective approach based on how many times people's names are found in the digitized copies of books available on Google Books, and whether Wikipedia considered these people scientists.
The Signpost takes a look at what they did and reports some of the trends in the data.
- ^ J. Bohannon (2011). "The Science Hall of Fame". Science. 331 (6014): 143. doi:10.1126/science.331.6014.143-c.