We all are aware of h-index; John Hawks brings to our attention another indicator of scientific output (which, for obvious reasons, I like to call the b-index, and is the number of beers somebody drinks per hour in a party):
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.
Hawks also calls for action at the end of his post:
All right, good scientists and bad scientists alike, you know what we have to do: DESTROY THIS CORRELATION!
I’d love to–but I can’t! So, I think I will just stick with correlation does not imply causation.
Tags: h-index
