Karl Marx is the most influential scholar of any field, according to a new project at Indiana University Bloomington.

Evaluating authors by their individual discipline is nothing new. But researchers in Indiana have established a new metric to evaluate author influence across disciplines.  Most measures of influence by discipline use an “h-index,” which is defined by the number (h) of a scholar’s publications that have at least h citations each.

The new metric defines a scholar’s influence by dividing their h-index by the average h-index of their field.

While Karl Marx does not appear on the list of top 10 scholars defined by the h-index, he rockets to #1 in the interdisciplinary “hs-index.”

A number of other critical theorists also benefit from the newly defined hs-index. Freud and Derrida follow Marx in the rankings. The top 100 also features Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant and  Gilles Deleuze.

The index is based off of Google Scholar queries, and is constantly changing. You can see the results for yourself at Scholarometer.

Note: While the original Nature article reported that Karl Marx appeared as the top scholar (this was independently verified by CT), recent queries do not show Marx anywhere in the top 100. A query of Karl Marx’s individual metrics yields an error, indicating that his disappearance from the charts may be a computer error.

[H/T Nature]