Abstract
A recent study claimed that heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists, as measured by the ability to attract citations from peers. It was suggested that to increase the probability of being cited one should reduce the density of equations in papers, that equations should be moved to appendices, and that math training among biologists should be improved. Here, we report a detailed study of the citation habits among physicists, a community that has traditionally strong training and dependence on mathematical formulations. Is it possible to correlate statistical citation patterns and fear of mathematics in a community whose work strongly depends on equations? By performing a systematic analysis of the citation counts of papers published in one of the leading journals in physics covering all its disciplines, we find striking similarities with distribution of citations recorded in biological sciences. However, based on the standard deviations in citation data of both communities, biologists and physicists, we argue that trends in statistical indicators are not reliable to unambiguously blame mathematics for the existence or lack of citations. We digress briefly about other statistical trends that apparently would also enhance citation success.
Highlights
In a recent work, Fawcett and Higginson reported an interesting statistical analysis of the citation habits prevalent among the community of biologists working in the fields of ecology and evolution [1]
Fawcett and Higginson considered theoretical papers to be those containing certain variations of the word model in their title or abstract, while equations were defined as mathematical expressions on lines set apart from the text, with two or more such equations written on the same line considered as separate
We present in two distinct ways the citation patterns observed in biological journals
Summary
Any further distribution of A recent study claimed that heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists, as this work must maintain measured by the ability to attract citations from peers. We report a detailed study of the citation habits among physicists, a community that has traditionally strong training and dependence on mathematical formulations. Is it possible to correlate statistical citation patterns and fear of mathematics in a community whose work strongly depends on equations? Based on the standard deviations in citation data of both communities, biologists and physicists, we argue that trends in statistical indicators are not reliable to unambiguously blame mathematics for the existence or lack of citations. We digress briefly about other statistical trends that apparently would enhance citation success
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