Y Wang is a polymath for the global age. Over the past ten years he or she has published more than 100 articles in 73 different academic disciplines, and appears to be affiliated to more than 500 universities in almost 100 countries.
Wang is one of an elite cadre of academics known as the “super-authors”, Chinese and Korean scientists of indefatigable industry who churn out as many as three academic papers a day.
These Stakhanovs of the laboratory are so prolific that they dominate one of the oldest tables listing researchers’ achievements, the Thomson Reuters essential science indicators, putting the luminaries of British science to shame.
Of the world’s top 100 academics by citation, 68 have Chinese surnames, 24 have Korean names and the remaining eight Japanese or Indian. More than half of the 100 are called Zhang, Wang, Li, Kim or Lee. Western Nobel prizewinners barely figure in the top 1,000.
How to explain this extraordinary stranglehold on science? According to Anne-Wil Harzing, professor of management at the University of Middlesex, it is simply that the database simply cannot tell the difference between the dozens of Far Eastern researchers who share family names and initials.
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“Thomson Reuters’ Web of Knowledge is the oldest — and, in the eyes of many, still the authoritative — provider of bibliometric data,” Professor Harzing wrote in the journal Scientometrics.
“One would therefore expect . . . the most sophisticated methods of author disambiguation. However, after a quick perusal of the top 100 most cited academics, we consider it highly unlikely that Thomson Reuters has applied author disambiguation effectively.”
Professor Harzing found that on average, each of the top academics had published 11,465 articles over the past decade and had been cited in other scientific papers 135,000 times.
“This is clearly not a feasible proposition unless these ‘academic superstars’ are in fact composed of multiple individuals,” she wrote. “The Chinese expression ‘three Zhang, four Li’, meaning ‘anyone’ or ‘just everybody’, seems to be particularly appropriate here.”
The confusion puts researchers with English names at a disadvantage to their Asian colleagues. S Hawking has published only 169 papers, compared with 762 by each Chinese scientist, 930 by each Korean and 1,118 by each Japanese. It is equally frustrating in China, where 85 per cent of the population share 129 surnames. Dozens of scholars can find themselves represented by the same initial and family name.
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Professor Harzing believes that there is a simple answer to the problem: allowing authors to list their full names in their native languages.
David Pendlebury, who designed the Thomson database, said the problem was common to scientific publishers and his team had listed the full names of the top 3,000 authors in a separate analysis online. “The essential science indicators never claimed to disambiguate author names, and it’s a problem that’s difficult and that all database producers are subject to and are dealing with on an ongoing basis,” he said.