The Scholarly Kitchen Blog discusses why one needs to understand statistics and such--or at least have a trusted acquaintance who can explain the field. In his post Reference List Length and Citations: A Spurious Relationship, blogger Philip Davis investigates the findings published in a recent study that the more references one tacks onto one's publication, the more references one generates to one's own work. One of the researchers told Nature, the prestigious science mag, "There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references. If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people."
Mr. Davis questions that conclusion and he uses an interesting law-related analogy to demonstrate the problem.
For instance, ice cream sales are highly correlated with the U.S. murder rate, but no one in their right mind would suggest that ice cream is responsible for violent behavior — that would give real meaning to “death by chocolate.” The underlying cause that connects murder with ice cream sales is heat. Heat makes people irritable and irrational, and given the right conditions, may lead to violent behavior. There is no theoretical basis of (sic) ice cream leading to violent behavior — this relationship is merely spurious (link omitted--Ed.)
Mr. Webster, the principal investigator, responds to Mr. Davis here, in the comments section; others also weigh in. Interesting debate.
We do need to look out for those logical fallacies, of course--finding two events that coincide conveniently, looking for links, and then thinking we find them because we've overlooked other, more likely possibilities. We are pattern seeking creatures and we do like narrative. It orders the world.
For more about logical fallacies, I recommend David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies (Harper Torchbooks, 1970), which is wonderfully readable, and not just for historians.
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