From AAO decision: NOV 5 2014:(eb2)
The assertion below concerns the claimed significance of the petitioner's
research work:
[The petitioner] has made, and continues to make, significant contributions
to the field of Toxicology and Pathology, all of which place him among the
top scientists working in his field of endeavor. ... [W]hen performing a
Google Scholar database search using the keywords "endothelin converting
arid lipopolysaccharide induced," [the petitioner's] (first-authored)
article on the subject appears [6]th out of [10,900] scholarly articles on
this highly-specialized research topic. . .. Thus, based on the search logic
of Google Scholar, [the petitioner's] publication is one of (b)(6) the most
important and influential articles when it comes to the research of the use
of endothelin antagonists in acute lung injury.
(Emphasis in original.) The Google Scholar search described above was for
five independent words, rather than a phrase or a combination of words and
phrases. Thus, the search engine result would include every article that
includes all of the keywords, whatever their context. The relatively high
placement of the petitioner's article among those results appears to be
because the article title includes the phrases "endothelin-converting" and "
lipopolysaccharide-induced." The petitioner submitted only the first page of
the search results, and therefore the record does not show that all of the
search engine's "hits" relate to the "highly-specialized research topic ...
of the use of endothelin antagonists in acute lung injury," or that the
petitioner's article "is one of the most important and influential" in that
area.
Furthermore, of the ten articles identified on the Google Scholar printout,
the petitioner's article has the smallest number of citations (7). Eight of
the other nine articles have 30 or more citations, and three of them have
over 100 citations each, with the most-cited article having 214 citations.