How would I judge the status of a researcher without talking to them or reading their papers? I was using Google Scholar to judge the rank of a researcher, but then realized I couldn't find everyone I wanted to and came across this question which highlighted this problem. Looking at Scorpus, which was suggested in that same answer, seems to downvalue any non-Elsevisor publications and not have any current data (from the last year). Microsoft Research seems altogether unintuitive to use and doesn't seem to have h-index at all. I tried PublishorPerish, but filtering data to find the correct researcher's papers seems ridiculously difficult.
I would like to be able to judge status somewhat programmatically, understanding there may be some flaws in this method, as it would be somewhat cumbersome to do it by hand on the scale I would like to. I will probably supplement it my sorting the top 3-5 by hand, but I would not like to do the entire set by hand.
Is there any proper solution to this problem? If not, what is the generally accepted method to do this?
At the behest of many people, I am a student, but this question is geared to generally understanding the current methods of researcher evaluation, not necessarily just by students
Assuming the question is about status and not quality:
Job title is a strong indicator of status.  The meaning of each title typically depends on the country.  For the US, as an example, named professorships have the highest status, followed by professors and associate professors.
The status of the university is also a strong predictor of status of the researcher.
&quot;Status&quot; is not quantitative and attempting to rank status is not productive.