Today it is crucial to produce extraordinary information. With the structural coupling of (only) positive feedback in social media, a forced exaggeration is taking place for not drowning in a sea of tweets.
This is also true for scientific publishing with a focus on successful studies and the run for a marathon publication list.
A key feature for this is statistics.
One of my favorite paper to this topic is: ‘Matthews, R.; 2000; “Storks Deliver Babies (p= 0.008)”; 36-38; Teaching Statistics; 1467-9639; 22/2; link‘. In this paper, it is ‘proofed’ that there is a highly significant correlation between the number of storks and the birth rate of children in European countries from 1980 to 1990. A wonderful situation for forced publication in self-marketing. With a sexy title and a lot of mathematical tables, publication for such a paper is probable.
In times of big data, this is the first and easiest way to stand the demands of forced publication – not only in sciences.
And think about the volume of research budgets from internet enterprises for big data. With such an extraordinary excitement, it might be possible to lose the lessons from the undergraduate lectures. And honestly – don’t you really know a research program where data is collected first and in a second step an ANOVA is showing the relations for the stated theory – without a pretest or theoretical background?
For a successful career, this is the basic skill in statistical self-marketing. It is more sophisticated to reverse this process – very famous in pharmacy. But this will be the topic for the next blog.
image:
EgoRegression by dundotcan
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