What is your Erdös number?

Looking at my post from yesterday, some mathematicians may (rightfully) say: when it comes to being identified in your field of knowledge by a number, nothing compares to the Erdös number (named after the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, one of the most prolific writers of mathematical papers, is a way of describing the "collaborative distance", in regard to mathematical papers, between an author and Erdös).

And maybe they're right...

In case you're curious, I'm an Erdös3, thanks to collaboration and paper co-authorship with Dr. Spyros Magliveras, officially listed as Erdös2.

What is your h-index?

Researchers are constantly trying to find accurate quantitative ways to measure the impact of their publications, the journals in which they are published, and the subsequent citations to their work. It is a noble, but ultimately imperfect, exercise.

One method is the Hirsch number (a.k.a. h-index), proposed by physicist Jorge Hirsch in 2005. Another method, the g-index, was suggested by in Leo Egghe in 2006.

If you want to know your h-index (or g-index, for that matter), you can try QuadSearch.

Here are my results (H-INDEX = 8; G-INDEX = 12 today).

An interesting feature of this site is that you can compare two authors side-by-side: just click on 'Compare', type the second author's name, and have fun!

Thanks to Liam Mayron for pointing it out to me.

How not to get fired: faculty promotion and tenure

I've recently completed the process of earning tenure (and promotion to Associate Professor) in an American university. Although entire books have been written on the topic, I'm particularly grateful to a talk by Prof. Andrew Meade (Mechanical Engineering, Rice University) back in January 2005, during the SHPE NTCC Conference in Dallas, TX. The slides for the talk can be downloaded from this link.

We are sorry to inform you...

Who among us hasn't gone through the not-so-pleasant experience of having a paper (or grant proposal) rejected? In a world where the 'publish or perish' mentality is prevalent, this is a common occurrence. Depending on when and how it happens, it can also be very frustrating.

In 2005, Simone Santini published a short paper reporting some famous cases of rejected articles written by some of the world's top engineers and computer scientists: "We are sorry to inform you ..." by Simone Santini, IEEE Computer, December 2005, pp 126--128.

It is a great reading, don't miss it! If you've recently had to go through the experience of rejection, it will make you feel better. :-)

Thanks for Joel Gibson for bringing it up...