Dear F.O. Farid

your answer is very nice and i am very interested to know more about your idea "f-index"

all the best

yaser

I could not agree more with Dr. Farid. Francis Crick is on record for published under 100 articles; the article that will be remembered best is his work with Watson as published in Nature in 1953. While working at MIT we were often confronted with evaluating someone's body of work. The standard that I would adopt was to note the number of first-author publications. This gets around the problem of the N boosting that often occurs in fields like biology. If this standard were followed faithfully many chairmen of elite departments would be out of work.

Ed Tehovnik.

PS. But I understand the importance of having a PI whose exclusive function it is to secure funding by giving speeches, but such individuals should not be called scientists.