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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. or, more precisely, no consensus to delete. There are a number of suggestions that a redirect with or without a merge might be appropriate. This can be taken forward on the article talk page or via WP:BB. This closure should not be cited as a consensus in favour of the article remaining a standalone article. Stifle (talk) 15:32, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Eva Mroczek

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Eva Mroczek (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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Scholar of Judaism who appears to fail WP:NPROF. Article is outdated: she's now an associate professor (i.e., not an endowed chair or university professor) at the University of California, Davis [1]. Oxford University Press publishes many, many books like hers [2] a year. Her book has been cited 116 times according to Google Scholar. Awards listed on her faculty profile are WP:ROUTINE. Other online hits like [3] are open letters she's signed; her work in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Religion Dispatches is exactly what mid-career academics publish all the time. Seems like she does interesting work, but doesn't appear notable—at least as yet. Notability tagged since 2016. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Women-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Judaism-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of California-related deletion discussions. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak delete. The book has multiple published reviews, easily found by searching for its title on Google Scholar. But with only one book, and other publications not highly cited, I think we have an issue of WP:BIO1E. If someone wants to make an article on the book we can redirect to it instead of deleting, as at this point the book looks more notable than its author. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:23, 15 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Neutral (new vote on the bottom), but I would like to add a few things. Apparently she is now a member of the Association for Jewish Studies according to their site. I am not sure if this association is "highly selective and prestigious", as required by WP:NACADEMIC criteria 3. Looking at the citation numbers of some other board members, I also fear that the nominee might pass the "average professor test" in her field. Also looking up "Jewish Antiquity" or "Jewish Marriage" in Scholar yields papers with very few citations, indicating that it is a very low cited field indeed. While her other works do not have many citations, she seems to have some activity in articles published in the web, in the publishers mentioned by the nominator, but there are not many secondary sources talking about her work, just a few facebook posts. She has very recently published two books Literature of the Jews, Fourth Century bce to Second Century ce and A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: Third Century BCE To Seventh Century CE (striked per comment below). With these considerations, I would rather leave decision to those that have more knowledge about the humanities fields, and judaism more specifically. Walwal20 talk ▾ contribs 06:37, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • A correction: she has not published two new books. "Literature of the Jews, Fourth Century bce to Second Century" is a book chapter, not a book, and "A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism" is the book containing it, an edited volume which is not even edited by her. That is very different from publishing two monographs, and adds very little to notability. (In general, it is not publications, but the impact of the publications as measured by citations or reviews by others that counts towards academic notability.) Also, for most academic societies (and I think in particular for AJS), membership is open to all, and does not contribute to notability; it is the selective honorary levels of membership that we are looking for, and AJS doesn't seem to even have those. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:10, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retain In case this is relevant, I wanted to weigh in that as a supervisor of PhD students (in the field of Early Judaism and New Testament), and an external/internal examiner of PhDs in the humanities, I have found that for almost every thesis I supervise or examine, I am finding it essential that they use Mroczek's monograph, even though it's from a different field. It is a book that, once written, is ignored at peril. To me, this means the book is more important than most monographs. I mean, I've got a monograph, but I don't think that all PhD students, even in adjacent fields, will do poorly unless they engage with it. With Mroczek's book, though, I'm finding that my PhD students cannot avoid it. In that way, it is what we in the British context rank as "worldchanging". Also, to the above commentor who thought her work was "low-cited," in general there is no way to monitor citations in the humanities. Most humanities citation does not occur in any way that appears online. Our journals are often not open-access (or not even available digitally), so it's not like the sciences or social sciences at all. It's apples and oranges. The lifelong giants in my field all appear "low-cited" online. These two points must play a factor in this decision, in my view. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.171.45.209 (talk) 15:54, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or redirect to an article about the book. The book is reviewed and respectably cited. But while I understand about low-citation fields, I'm not seeing any evidence of impact besides the one book. The subject apparently has another book in progress, and will probably meet WP:NAUTHOR once that is released and reviewed. But Wikipedia is not a crystal ball, and it looks like a case of WP:TOOSOON for now. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 18:12, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity, which exists now. I'm sympathetic to the argument that a scholar can become wiki-notable even for a single book, if it's a really influential book. But without a heap of third-party documentation to that effect, it's a tough argument to sell. I think the safest course of action is to have an article on the monograph for now, and recreate one for the author if, as seems plausible, the situation changes after her second book. The existing article is sufficiently dry and boilerplate that making it a redirect would be no great loss of prose. XOR'easter (talk) 22:06, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Addendum I've looked over the expansions made after I left my !vote, and I don't see a reason to change my !vote to a "keep". The accomplishments listed in the article still seem typical for an early/mid-career academic. For example, getting a couple years' salary to conduct a research project is nice, but not exceptional, and the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships were awarded to many scholars each year. One sometimes says that a person was "awarded" a grant, but grants are not awards in the sense of prizes, honors, or medals. (Convincing a funding agency that your work could potentially be productive is not the same as the community recognizing that your work has been productive.) XOR'easter (talk) 17:32, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity per XOR'easter. I'm not withdrawing this nom, given that there doesn't seem to be consensus as to Mroczek's notability in her own right, but I think redirecting is quite a sensible solution—especially as it preserves the edit history. AleatoryPonderings (talk) 22:11, 16 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retain The page has been updated and the case for notability is stronger now. In relative comparison to other biographical pages on Wikipedia, I think that this page makes a good case for notability and should not be deleted. Srsval (talk) 09:20, 17 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect as others have said per WP:BIO1E, perhaps a case of WP:TOOSOON as well. There might be something that can be merged too. -Kj cheetham (talk) 11:56, 18 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retain. The first criterion for WP:NPROF is that "The person's research has had a significant impact in their scholarly discipline, broadly construed, as demonstrated by independent reliable sources." Reading the reviews for her monograph makes it clear that she has had such an impact on the field of ancient Jewish/Biblical studies. I have updated the page to replace the dead links with live ones, add further references, demonstrate the importance of her work, and generally give it more of a structure. It also makes little sense to have a very short page for her monograph rather than a more detailed one about her work overall including the monograph, so I have incorporated the information from the monograph page into this page and propose to redirect the monograph page rather than vice versa. Eritha (talk) 13:34, 19 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retain In line with Eritha's arguments. In particular it seems better to retain the page and redirect the (shorter and less substantial) book page rather than vice versa. Clio987 (talk) 16:52, 19 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep Someone who has written a work that has been described as 'field-changing' and 'one that all scholars of antiquity should read' clearly passes the very first criteria of WP:NACADEMIC. Richard Nevell (talk) 11:42, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Anyone can call people anything. The first criterion seeks *measurable* impact, usually in the form of citations or (more appropriately for this case) book reviews, not hype. And #C1 specifically asks for "several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates". One is not several, and her one book has a significant number of reviews but is not extremely highly cited. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:49, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@David Eppstein:: as has been pointed out before, online citation counts are not remotely reliable for this field, where many publications are not available online and so do not show up in Google scholar et al. Citation counts are simply not used as a measure of impact in fields like this as they are in many scientific fields. Eritha (talk) 09:38, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@David Eppstein: Where quantitative analysis fails due to a subject's poor coverage in citation indices, a qualitative approach based opinions from people working in the field seems appropriate, hence the book reviews. The guidelines notes that having multiple highly cited publications is the 'most typical' way to satisfy the criteria, so not the only way. Richard Nevell (talk) 15:57, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Both of you are replying to what I didn't say, rather than what I did say. I said book reviews are more important than citations in this case, to which you both replied "citation counts bad!". Yes, but that doesn't strengthen your case at all. We can and should use reviews instead of citation counts for a case like this. But it still doesn't show that she passes #C1, which demands either several works of extremely high impact (she has zero, not several) or a substantial number of works with significant impact (she has one, not a substantial number). So Richard Nevell's justification for his opinion is bogus. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:02, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"Citation counts bad" wasn't precisely what I meant to convey, more "citation counts have their limitations, and need to be handled carefully". As for satisfying C1, it is entirely possible for us to be reading the guideline in different ways and there is room for interpretation and disagree without it being bogus (even if anyone can call people anything). Anyway, have an excellent day. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:52, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don' see any reasonable way to read "several or a substantial number" as being satisfied by a single work. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:02, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Just wanted to add that WP:NPROF does not make a hard requirement for "several extremely highly cited scholarly publications or a substantial number of scholarly publications with significant citation rates", although this is the "most typical" way to determine notability. Walwal20 talk ▾ contribs 13:09, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Cts499m: I don't think uninformed speculation about the reviewer's motivation is helpful or appropriate. As for 'only a PhD student', what that means is she is a researcher in this field and therefore qualified to makes judgements on the impact of such works. The point of literature reviews in PhDs is to centre that research within the wider field, and you end up becoming familiar with the subject. What it is is a reliable source telling us how the book has been received. And the second quote comes from another author. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:19, 21 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Richard Nevell: A student is not enough of an authority on the subject to establish that somebody's work is 'field-changing'--Cts499m (talk) 01:08, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Cts499m I have to disagree with that. I'm more concerned with the fact that the PhD student comes from the same university of the nominee. Walwal20 talk ▾ contribs 12:40, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect/weak delete. Seems like WP:TOOSOON for WP:PROF. No in-depth coverage, a few mentions in passing, one recent notable work... Let's wait until she has at least two notable works or until someone writes a tribute to her impact on the field. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:47, 22 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. While both sides have convincing arguments, it appears to me that the first criterion of WP:NACADEMIC is fulfilled, and this criterion does not disregard recognition for a single work, even considering the general notes in WP:NPROF. Also, the same general notes mention that the criteria "sets the bar fairly low, which is natural", so I'm convinced that the article should be kept. I'm supporting myself on Eritha's content that has been added to the article, on the other 'retain' voters comments, on the citation number for her main book, on the fact that such a book has copies in numerous places [4], on the fact that her book (being written based on her thesis) comprises content from multiple of her articles and thus can be seen as multiple work, on the secondary sources that comment on Eva's work (cited in her article), and other aspects mentioned here and in the article. Walwal20 talk ▾ contribs 12:56, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Just a thought, rather than WP:NPROF, maybe could consider WP:AUTHOR given the multiple reviews of the monograph? -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:37, 23 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NAUTHOR is a better fit than WP:NPROF here, but has the same WP:BLP1E issue – it generally requires multiple reviews of multiple works. I think everyone agrees that she's likely to meet our notability guidelines if she ever gets her second book published. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 07:34, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I interpretted #3 as "The person has created or played a major role in co-creating a significant or well-known work or collective body of work. In addition, such work must have been the primary subject of an independent and notable work (for example, a book, film, or television series, but usually not a single episode of a television series) or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.", and when crossing out some sides of the OR statements, it sounds like a single work with multiple reviews is acceptable? -Kj cheetham (talk) 08:10, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
But WP:BLP1E also applies: the subject is known almost exclusively for the single book, with moderately good citations and a handful of reviews (and some WP:ILIKEIT support here). A very highly notable single work can override BLP1E, but I'm not seeing evidence of that level of notability; such would be unlikely in such a restricted subfield. The precedent of the AfDs I have observed points towards a redirect. It appears likely that she'll get the 2nd book out soon, and I expect that will tip this firmly towards keep, but I'm engaging in WP:CRYSTAL there. For now, this still looks WP:TOOSOON to me. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 19:05, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Fair point. I'm going to leave my !vote as redirect I think. -Kj cheetham (talk) 19:09, 24 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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