Identify Original Authors

From Scholarpedia

One of the most difficult problem is to figure out whom to invite for which article. The philosophy of Scholarpedia is to get the original inventors. Some people who were not invited complained that "they were the original inventors, yet the editor-in-chief invited somebody else".

It is difficult to identify who was the first. When in doubt, editors of Scholarpedia talk to other experts or initiate election of authors.

Named articles

There is one exceptional case where there is no ambiguity whom to invite: If a model, theorem, network, phenomenon, etc., is named after a person, and the person is still alive, then the person should be invited for such an article: John Hopfield for Hopfield Network, Teuvo Kohonen for Kohonen Network, Leo Chua for Chua Circuit, Dick FitzHugh for FitzHugh-Nagumo Model (Nagumo died a long time ago; Dick died a few weeks ago, but he wrote the article more than a year ago). The list of such people/articles is at Scholarpedia:Authors, however, there are thousands of people who should be invited.

Criteria for named articles

To be invited, the author/article pair should satisfy the following conditions:

• The author, XXX, must be alive.
• The Google search "XXX Model" (or whatever) made with quotes (") should result in more than 250 hits.

For example, "Morris-Lecar Model" results in 1300 hits, so Harold Lecar was invited (and wrote) the article. In contrast, "Izhikevich Neuron" results in 144 hits, so such an entry is premature. Notice that searching Izhikevich neuron without quotes results in 6,800 hits, so it is important to use quotes.

Of course, this is for new articles in Scholarpedia.

Needed info

It is convenient for the editors to create accounts for invited authors when the information is given in the form

Title:
Name:
Email:
Affiliation:
Suggested:

Do not change the text, just add the author info. For example,

Title: Bursting
Name: Eugene M. Izhikevich
Email: Eugene.Izhikevich@nsi.edu
Affiliation: The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA
Suggested:Skinner

Here, 'skinner' is the username of an editor; put your username. This is to acknowledge your suggestion and to mention it in the article stub.

The best way to go ahead for named articles: create the articles

The best way to make the suggestion and to ensure that the person is invited is the following:

• Type the title of the article in search window and press 'title' button. If the article does not exist, click the red link that creates a new article with this title (Make sure you provide titles in "Sentence case".)
• Open the article for editing and put the template with filled information there

Name: Eugene M. Izhikevich
Email: Eugene.Izhikevich@nsi.edu
Affiliation: The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA
Suggested:Skinner

and then click save page button. There is no reason to provide the title there (it is the title of the article). You may leave "suggested:" field, but it is better if you click 'anonymity' link above the article's title to reveal your name to everybody. This way, people will see that the article was created by you. Of course, your name will be revealed forever for this article, so you will not be able to anonymously peer-review it or make further changes to it say 20 years from now (your identity will be known).

• Once you created a few such stubs, send the editor-in-chief an email with http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/.... links. If everything done right, the editor-in-chief could handle tens of suggestions/invitations per day without investing much time.

Where to search

It is easy to check whether an author/article pair satisfies the criteria above, but it is much more difficult to find such a pair! This is why your help is really needed.

Talk to your colleagues and professors. Google the web, search your memory. Share your methods in the 'reviews' part of this page.

A good place for medical terms (named after people) is at http://www.whonamedit.com. There is a "list persons by last name" link at the top-right corner, which provides birth and death dates; Most of the people lived in the nineteenth century and are dead. However, there are a few people relatively young people who are still alive and active.

People of interest

I need the contact info of Dr. Oleh Hornykiewicz from Vienna (to invite for the article "Dopamine". He discovered the absence of DA in Parkinson's patients.).

Who invented Magnetoencephalogram? User:Okadayoshio and User:Mosher declined to write this article. Who else was at the origins of this technique?

Who is the best for the following articles (please, for each article, see the history of invitation to exclude the people who already declined):

• Spike decoding (besides Bialek)
• Speech area (besides Ojemann)
• Cognitive development
• Developmental neuroanatomy
• Firing rate (besides Michael Shadlen)
• Neuronal differentiation

Candidates

Append your suggestions below. Put any relevant information. Once editors follow your suggestions, they remove the info from the list. Also, put here suggestions of author/topics where there is no doubt that the author was the original inventor. (For example, J. Watson for DNA).

Crossed-out articles are those for which the invitation will be (or was) sent.

Title: FFT algorithms and spectral analysis of signals
Name: James Cooley
Email: ???
Affiliation: IBM (retired?), University of Rhode Island
Suggested: nwerneck

Title: Modified Z-transofrm
Name: Eliahu Ibraham Jury
Email: ??? 
Affiliation: University of Miami (retired?)
Suggested: nwerneck

 Title: Backus-Naur Form, Algol 60 programming language
Name: Peter Naur
Email: ??? 
Affiliation: University of Copenhagen
Suggested: nwerneck

Title: Lin-Kernighan algorithm
Name: Brian Kernighan, Shen Lin
Email: Lin's email ???
Affiliation: Princeton University
Suggested: nwerneck

Title: Nambu-Goto action
Name: Yoichiro Nambu, Tetsuo Goto
Email: Goto's email ???
Affiliation: Department of Physics and Atomic Energy, Research Institute, Nihon University, Tokyo
Suggested: nwerneck

Since I enabled the "acknowledgement" feature in the article, there is no need to put your suggestions here (remember, we did that so there is a trace of history of who suggested whom). You can just email your suggestions (your templates) to emailto:suggestion@scholarpedia.org and I will send the invitations. Also, I changed the instructions at Scholarpedia:Suggest authors. Newly registered people must make a suggestion per these instructions before their accounts are activated. Please, check/correct this page.

Guys, please, restrict your suggestions to non-controversial topics where there is no argument who invented/discovered it first. The best way is to invite all the people who have topics named after them. Also, an invitation must have an email, otherwise, I cannot send it.

Title: 
Name: 
Email: 
Affiliation: 
Suggested: 

Title: 
Name: 
Email: 
Affiliation: 
Suggested: 

Title: 
Name: 
Email: 
Affiliation: 
Suggested: