Scientists: More pubs means less publications

By William Atkins
Saturday, 15 March 2008 21:57

Science - Health

It appears in the Oikos, the journal of The Nordic Ecological Society.

Grim, like all scientists, knew that the number of scientific papers produced each year is a major way that scientists are evaluated in the scientific community.

However, he also knew that very few, if no, studies have considered social activities on the quantity of such papers.

Grim states in New Scientist magazine, “Despite a plethora of papers on the issue of publication and citation biases, no study has so far considered a possible effect of social activities on publication output.” [New Scientist, March 8-14, 2008, page 56]

Thus, to introduce his paper, Grim states, “One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking alcohol.” In Europe, according to the World Health Organization, most of the alcohol consumed is beer.

Grim already knew about this statistic, so decided to use beer as the basis of this hypothesis.

Considering that cognitive performance is usually degraded (aka: we don’t think quite as clearly) as more alcohol is consumed, Grim hypothesized before his study began that there will be a negative correlation between beer consumption and scientific performance (quantity and quality of scientific papers produced).

[Authors’ note: I agree that this is a very reasonable assumption to make! Cheers!]

In other words, as more [less] beer is drunk, less [more] quantity of papers are produced and of those papers produced, they will be of lesser [greater] quality.

Grim used a survey (which was conducted starting in 1980) from the Czech Republic that involved avian ecologists.

He used such a survey probably because the country, as he states, has the “highest per capita beer consumption rate in the world.”

In fact, citizens of the Czech Republic drink on average 332 pints (157 liters) or about 5,309 fluid ounces (about 442 twelve-ounce cans) of beer each year. [The Daily Telegraph: “Why beer harms science”]

The conclusions of Grim (they are being called "grim conclusions" by beer-drinking scientists), are found on the next page.