food for thought: pub vs. publication?
From a short article in the New York Times, comes the assertion that scientists who drink more beer publish less often. ”After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier may be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer. According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper’s quality and importance.” Could a pint a day – or less – really be a recipe for success?
Jaime on 29 Dec 2008 at 7:36 pm #
…well, we all hope to be or to enjoy the company, of exceptions to the rule! A number of brewing scientists seem to crank out their research papers while regularly being found with a beer in front of them.
The paper is by a Czech zoologist, “A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists”
Tomáš Grim, Oikos Volume 117, Issue 4 , Pages 484 – 487
The abstract clearly states:” In Europe, most alcohol is consumed as beer and, based on well known negative effects of alcohol consumption on cognitive performance, I predicted negative correlations between beer consumption and several measures of scientific performance. Using a survey from the Czech Republic, that has the highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world, I show that increasing per capita beer consumption is associated with lower numbers of papers, total citations, and citations per paper (a surrogate measure of paper quality). In addition I found the same predicted trends in comparison of two separate geographic areas within the Czech Republic that are also known to differ in beer consumption rates.”
…for what it’s worth, the theorem rings true for me, personally! (Then again, my work is not measured on regularity of peer-reviewed publications so I don’t have much preclusion to do the hard work and prepare publication submissions very frequently).