Thursday, March 20, 2008
Should Scientists Avoid Beer?
The New York Times has a funny article - well, at least I was amused - about a negative correlation between the amount of beer scientists drink and the amount of successful papers they publish:
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.But, as one source pointed out, there's a difference between correlation and causality. Two things happening at the same time are not necessarily linked by one causing the other. And it would be possible to get this completely backwards. Maybe, instead of beer drinking causing lack of publishing productivity, it is low spirits over being at the back of the pack that pushes some scientists to seek consolation with barley and hops.
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.
