WikiFindings

Even physicists are “afraid” of mathematics

Background

Previous analysis of articles citing other articles in biology showed that scientists avoid maths-heavy articles. This finding attracted criticism, especially from a paper by physicists. This paper suggested that the effect was not real but only appeared because of how we plotted the data, and that the effect was also not present in physics papers.

Findings

We defend our earlier paper by explaining how our analysis was based on statistical analysis, not plotting graphs. We also re-analysed the data from the physics journal using this statistical approach, and find that there actually is an effect. Physics papers that have a high density of equations are less cited by other physics papers. The reduction in citations is less dramatic for physics papers—between 6% and 8% fewer citations for each additional equation per page (28% in biology) —but it is still a substantial effect.

Implications

Previous analysis of articles citing other articles in biology showed that scientists avoid maths-heavy articles. This finding attracted criticism, especially from a paper by physicists. This paper suggested that the effect was not real but only appeared because of how we plotted the data, and that the effect was also not present in physics papers.