“Testing is tattooed on my forehead”

Last year, when Erik Jan Marinissen heard that his papers at the IEEE International Test Conference (ITC) had made him the most-cited ITC author over the last 25 years, he didn’t believe it. “I had skipped a plenary lunch session to set up a presentation that I would give later that day when passers-by started congratulating me. For what, I asked them. They explained that it had just been announced that I’m the most-cited ITC author over the past 25 years. Well, I thought, that can’t be right. Of course, I had presented a couple of successful papers over the years, but surely the demigods of the test discipline – the people I look up to – would be miles ahead of me,” tells Marinissen.

Back at home, Marinissen got to work. He wrote a piece of software that sifted through the conference data to produce a ‘hit parade’ of authors and papers. The outcome was clear: not only was he the most-cited author, but his lead over his idols was also actually quite substantial. ITC being the most prominent scientific forum in his field, there was no question about it: Marinissen is an authority in the test and design-for-test (DfT) disciplines (see inset “What’s design-for-test?”).