News release
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www.selu.edu/news
Contact: Christina Chapple
Date: 11/5/02
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SOUTHEASTERN ECOLOGIST NAMED TO TOP 100 SCIENTIFIC CITATIONS LIST HAMMOND -- One of the world’s most prestigious scientific prizes is not awarded by a panel of experts, but by a large computer in Philadelphia. And one of the recipients of this computer-generated honor is ecologist Paul Keddy, the Schlieder Endowed Chair in Environmental Studies at Southeastern Louisiana University. The computer, which is maintained by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), inspects every paper published in respected scientific journals. It then counts and reports on which scientists are having their work cited by other scientists, and how often. The Institute for Scientific Information recently began sorting through the computers’ citation reports to establish the top 100 scientists in each discipline. Keddy is among the100 most-cited scientists in the field of ecology and environment. According to the ISI, the Canadian-born ecologist, who has published more than 100 scholarly papers, two books and a dozen book chapters during his 25-year career, had thousands of citations to his written work. Keddy said his award took him entirely by surprise. “Some people carefully monitor their citation rate each year. I do not,” he said. “I thought that if it was low, it would only annoy me, and if it was high, it would only inflate my ego. So I did my research and let it speak for itself. “It is sometimes puzzling to see which work is highly cited,” he added. “Sometimes papers that I regarded as very important contributions – say an experiment that took five years to run – have been all but ignored by colleagues. Others that I thought were rather minor contributions seem to have taken on a life of their own. It suggests to me that there is a good deal of serendipity involved as to whether anyone reads any of your work at all.” “This goes to show that you do not have to work at a big university in order to accomplish high impact science,” said Nick Norton, head of Southeastern’s Biological Sciences Department. ”We are very pleased that Dr. Keddy moved to Southeastern to accept our endowed chair.” Norton said that for professors of ecology, such awards are particularly important, “because the Nobel Prize committee does not award prizes in ecology and environment. As a consequence, even major advances in that field tend to go unreported.” The idea of using computer-tallied citations to monitor scientists is a relatively new one and it has its critics, Keddy said. In spite of some limitations, Keddy said they are increasingly used in academic decisions involving promotion and tenure, since they provide one way to measure a scholar’s impact. Scholarly research by professors like Keddy is a vital part of coastal restoration, said Al Doucette, interim dean of Southeastern’s College of Arts and Sciences. “The wetlands of Louisiana are vital to the well-being of much of North America,” said Doucette, who is a fisheries biologist. “They provide a significant proportion of the seafood consumed in the United States and protect our ports and energy pipelines from storm damage. Our efforts to protect and restore these wetlands must use the best possible science – otherwise conservation projects may be wasteful or they may even cause more harm than good. ” Keddy’s first book, “Competition,” proposed that competition among species is as important to biology as gravity is to the study of astronomy. This book won two scholarly prizes, and has now appeared in a second edition. “Wetland Ecology,” published just last year, is being used as a text in many college classrooms as a text book. Norton said part of the reason for the impact of Keddy’s work is that he has worked simultaneously in many fields, including wetland ecology, rare plant conservation, the theory and analysis of competition, and the principles of biological diversity in ecological communities. “Sometimes,” Keddy said, “I meet people who think all I do is study competition. Others think that I am a wetland ecologist, and are surprised to know that I have also carried out research in rare plant communities in dry habitats such as alvars. And then I have worked in different geographical areas, too, such as the Great Lakes, the Ottawa Valley and Nova Scotia. And now I am conducting research in Louisiana swamps and pine savannas. “Each part of the world tends to have its own readership, which sometimes is unfortunate, since an important idea discovered, say, in Nova Scotia, could apply equally as well to Louisiana,” he said. “That is why one tries to write books to show how all the pieces fit together.” Keddy still remembers his first paper. “Back when I was an undergraduate, a friend and I were canoeing on Greenleaf Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park when we found a strange looking fern growing on a cliff by the water,” he said. “It turned out to be a hybrid new to science. That was fun, and I still have a picture of the fern in my office. “It’s unlikely anyone has ever cited that study, but the good folks at ISI will know if anyone did,” Keddy said. Keddy described his latest paper as “a review of four models that allow managers to enhance and maintain the biological diversity of wetlands.” The next Keddy project that the computer will count is a book on the world’s largest wetlands, which he is co-editing for Cambridge University Press. “I have tried to bring together world experts to describe the large wetlands that occur in their region,” Keddy said. “The largest two wetlands -- the Amazon River floodplain, and the vast peatlands of central Siberia – are very different. There are many language and cultural barriers to communication among scientists as far afield as Russia and Brazil. Somehow we have to put the big story together into one coherent book. We will have to wait a few years for the giant computer at ISI to tell us if any scientists read this work,” Keddy said. |
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