Here's the citation (it's available through GT), since it's quite likely that the link won't work:
Grim, T. 2008. A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists. Oikos 117: 484-487.
I'll include the major figure from the paper as well.
I think that my major criticism of this study is it's scale. It's quite likely that the forces that influence publication rates in the Czech Republic are different than the forces that influence publication rates in other countries. Also, Grim considered only evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology. My hunch (and I have no data for this) is that scientists who work in these fields might consume more alcohol on average than scientists in other fields. Might there be some sort of intermediate consumption hypothesis? Also, perhaps someone can take a closer look at the statistics and comment on that. Finally, there's always the issue that correlation does not equal causation. Does beer consumption lead to low publication rates? Or do low publication rates lead to beer drinking? Or maybe there's some third factor (I think he tried to control for age, but it could be something like depression or marital status) that relates to both. I'll leave it to you to discuss.
5 comments:
how can you have negative publications?
Ha, as I was reading this I was thinking "She hasn't mentioned 'correlation doesn't equal causation yet." But then I got to the bottom and there it was.
I kind of want to hang that graph on my fridge.
i agree with melissa about hanging it on the fridge, possibly on our department commons for the good instruction of all
the blogger from phd comics also noted this piece, but without the depth and insight you did, Emily.
I distributed this to my labmates. While I don't think their beer consumption will change, we all laughed.
Mark Hay sent this paper to the IGERT list in February. See what you miss by not reading your IGERT emails?
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