Karl Marx Is the World’s Most Influential Scholar [View all]

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http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/11/karl-marx-is-the-worlds-most-influential-scholar/

How do you judge an academic? Can you compare scholars from different fields on equal footing? Whose work had the bigger impact down field, Albert Einstein or Ada Lovelace?

These seem like impossible questions to answer, but as reported by Nature, a team of information scientists out of Indiana University, Bloomington, think they’ve found a way. And, according to them, the most influential scholar is… Karl Marx.

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The Indiana University researchers, say Nature, tried to take this into account. First they looked to see if a scientist had not just one big study, but lots of work that was all cited regularly (rolled up in a measure called the h-index). Then, they compared the scientist’s score against others in their own respective field. This let them calculate how much of a stand-out they were.

Karl Marx’s score was “more than 22 times the average h-index of other scholars in history (but 11 times that of the average economist).”

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