Abstract
Recognition of past and present figures among the members of a scientific community is one ob-servable trace of disciplinary memory, but it is not the same as historical influence. This article reports a purposive, single-round expert nomination survey of geoscientists working in Portugal. Respondents were asked to nominate up to ten geoscientists whom they considered most relevant to the development of geological knowledge in each of seven chronological and thematic do-mains, from the Geotectonic Framework of the Iberian Peninsula to the Meso-Cenozoic of the Atlantic Islands. In 2026, 230 geoscientists affiliated with ten Portuguese public universities were invited. Of the 129 responses received, 45 were complete, and 39 of these contained nominations: 818 nominations in 126 domain lists (mean 6.5 names per list), naming 212 distinct geoscientists. Nominations are strongly concentrated. António Ribeiro is the most nominated geoscientist in four domains (tied with Nery Delgado in the Lower Paleozoic), Paul Choffat in the Mesozoic, João Pais in the Cenozoic and José Madeira in the Atlantic Islands, while most nominees receive a sin-gle nomination. Three figures born in the nineteenth century (Carlos Ribeiro, Nery Delgado and Paul Choffat) account for 9.2% of all nominations. An operational criterion of the project Geology of Portugal through Faces (GeoFaces), at least three nominations (five in the Geotectonic Framework), defines a biographical corpus of 53 individuals (83 domain-level memberships), three of whom are women. Adding partial responses removes no one from the corpora and leaves every domain’s leading nominee in first place (in the Lower Paleozoic the tie is resolved in favour of Ribeiro). The results describe recognition among the respondent panel. They do not establish a consensus of the Portuguese geoscientific community or the historical influence of the nominees.