Who Shaped Portuguese Geology? Consensus Rankings of the Most Influential Geoscientists Across Seven Chronological and Thematic Domains

The disciplinary memory of a scientific community, the collective recognition of the researchers who have most contributed to a field, is a sociologically relevant yet underexplored dimension of Earth sciences. This study presents consensus rankings of geoscientists that developed scientific research about Geology of Portugal. A nomination survey, organized into seven chrono-thematic domains (Geotectonic Framework of the Iberian Peninsula, Precambrian, Lower Paleozoic, Upper Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, and Meso-Cenozoic of the Portuguese Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira), was distributed in 2026 to a purposive sample of 230 geoscientists affiliated with Portuguese public universities. Of the 129 responses received, 45 complete responses were included in the ranking analysis. For each domain, complete descriptive statistics are presented, together with rankings of geoscientists with three or more nominations and the cut-off criteria for the biographical corpus. In total, 45 respondents produced 817 nominations, with an average of 6.5 names per list. The results reveal cross-domain consensus, with figures such as António Ribeiro, Paul Choffat, José Madeira, and João Pais emerging as canonical references. At the same time, the asymmetric distribution of nominations, with long tails of geoscientists mentioned only once, indicates that the community's knowledge of past contributions is diverse and partly idiosyncratic. To the best of the authors' knowledge, these rankings constitute the first evidence-based systematization of the disciplinary memory of Portuguese geosciences and provide the empirical basis for the project Geology of Portugal through Faces.