Who is The Most Influential Scientists in The World?

Posted by Isra Anwar

July 18, 2014

Who is the most influential scientists in the world? Is it true that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Charles Darwin was the most influential?

Scholarometer networking site developed by Phil Menczer, informatics experts from Indiana Universty of Bloomington, and colleagues, Jasleen Kaur and Filipo Radicchi, reveal that both Darwin, Einstein, and Hawking is not the most influential.

Nature reported on Wednesday (11/06/2013), the most influential scientist of all time according to the site in order are of Karl Marx (historian), Sigmund Freud (psychologist), and Edward Witten (physicist).

Karl Marx is known as the originator of the Marxist movement and author of the legendary book, Das Kapital. Sigmund Freud is known as the developer of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, Witten is known as the only physicist who won the Fields Medal, the award in the field of mathematics.

How Scholarometer compile the ranking of the most influential scientists in the world? How did they compare that obviously came from different disciplines?

One of the parameters to determine the influence of a scientist is a citation or citations in scientific papers. So far, there are obstacles in preparing for meditation in ranking the influence of one field and the other is different.

For example, an expert biokmia the mediocre have more referrals than a mathematician because biochemistry is more attractive and more widely studied.

To compile the ranking of the most influential scientists and comparing inter-field, Menczer and colleagues developed the h-index.

H-index are used to "neutralize" biased inter-discipline knowledge in the preparation of the ranking. Meanwhile, to measure the h-index, Menczer and his colleagues still rely on Google Scholar. Ranking can be constantly updated.

H-index is used as a divisor. Menzer measure how many times greater than the score of the h-index of a scientist.

Revealed, Marx had a score of 22 times the h-index compared to an average of 11 times a historian and h-index than the average economist. Meanwhile, Witten had a score of 13 times the h-index compared to the average physicist.

Werner Marx of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart revealed, it is difficult to say that the preparation of this ranking can be consistent. Accuracy still depends on the ranking of Google Scholar which also has weaknesses.

However, Menczer said, the important thing here is to allow people to think beyond their discipline.

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