Around Christmas last year, Nature published a letter by Richard Ladle et al. on the increasing amount of papers being submitted on Christmas day. It’s hardly relevant yet amusing. But how far can scientists go with these ‘pseudoscientific’ papers?
In the most recent issue of Oikos, Grim relates publication success… to beer drinking. He studied avian evolutionary biologists in the Czech Republic and found a significant negative correlation between the amount of beer consumed per year and the total number of papers published. I wonder what he was consuming with A.P. Moller (see Acknowledgments section) when they invented the “social effects” hypothesis outlined in the paper.
What I mean is that finding correlations (even silly ones) is relatively easy, but I don’t think real journals are the proper forum for such nonsense. Otherwise, Venganza, who found a significant negative relation between the global average temperature and the number of pirates, should have submitted his work to a high-impact paper as well…
I come from the Czech Republic (actually studied in Olomouc, where Grim is located; not that I know him, though) and I had to laugh reading the abstract. I consider this as a good joke, better than the mentioned correlation with Christmas.
That he got it published? Well, it’s not his responsibility, is it? Any scientific journal should have quality people who prevent publishing rubbish.