New Creativity Index

Jose Soler came up with a new "creativity index" by analysing scientific publications.

" According to his definition of creativity, a paper that has lots of references but only a few citations will have a low level of "creativity", while a paper with just a few references and lots of citations, in contrast, will have a very high creativity. The creativity index (C_a) of a particular scientist can then be calculated by summing the total creativity for every paper that author has written, normalized for the number of co-authors in each case."

Using ISI Web of Knowledge, he found that Philip Anderson is the most creative physicist in the world. It would be interesting to see the results of this methodlogy using Scopus . What happens if he is not? Are we (Elsevier and Thomson) now in the business of deciding who is the most "creative" scientist?

I don't think that the terminology of this index is correct? I would prefer to call this something else. How about a physicist who is getting a ridiculous amount of money from her university to support her family, and getting no funding for her research, no funding to buy books and articles and still doing an excellent job teaching and contributing to the society. May be this physicist deserves the most creativity honor.