ABS&Comment: Genest, Probability and statistics

[Gretchen Whitney]

"Probability and statistics: A tale of two worlds?" Christian  Genest at the
Universite Laval, Dept Math & Stat., St. Foy, PQ G1K 7P4, Canada
email: genest at mat.ulaval.ca
CANADIAN JOURNAL OF STATISTICS 27:(2) 421-444 June 1999

THE AUTHOR CITES NINE REFERENCES INCLUDING an earlier key paper by Steven M
Stigler. and
  Derek deSolla Price "Little Science, Big Science" 1963,  but mistakenly
treats his middle name as his last name. The safest way to cite Price is DJD
Price for Derek John deSolla Price.

This comparative study of research productivity and publication habits in
probability and statistics completed the author's previous  paper

( C. Genest, "Statistics on Statistics: measuring research productivity by
journal publications between 1985 and 1995, Canad. J. Statistics
25:441-57(1997).

The study is based on a ten year survey of eighteen international journals,
half of which are specialized in probability theory and the other half in
statistics. Paper, author

and adjusted page counts yield cursory measures of productivity for
countries and institutions that contributed to fundamental research in these
two related fields during

the period 1986-95. These data also reveal significant cultural differences
between probabilists and statisticians in the volume of research, the length
of papers,

coauthorship practices,etc. Canada is seen to be one of the strongest
contributors to the development of these two disciplines.

The paper is full of interesting tables with many surprises in the rankings.
For example, Israel and The Netherlands are the top two countries for
probability based on GNP

 per capita. On the other hand Canada and Australia ranked tops for
statistics using the variable pages/pop. The University of Paris VI is the
top institution for publication

output in probability while Stanford is tops for statistics. The University
of Delaware is the most productive in probability and statistics
irrespective of size (table 12). In

table 15 Cornell Univ..is reported to have  the most prolific researchers .
The authors point out that they have not made an attempt to evaluate quality

through citation analysis.

Eugene Garfield, PhD.
Chairman Emeritus, ISI http://www.isinet.com
Publisher, The Scientist http://www.the-scientist.com
email garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu
tel 215-243-2205
fax 215-387-1266
home page http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/eugene_garfield