More about brevity, this time with pictures

Sat 28 Sep 2013 01:44 PM

Because the last entry wasn't trivial enough, I've rendered the data as a chart.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of a picture where the y-axis is thousands of words?

Single-authored papers are in blue, and coauthored papers are in red.

I've also included the best-fit lines, which show a slight increase over time. Looking at that slope makes me cringe a bit, because I don't like to think of myself as getting more long-winded as I grow older. If brief exposition was good enough in the old days, it should still suffice today!

Fortunately, the best-fit lines don't represent much of a trend. The correlation coefficient between length of paper and year of publication is just r = .19.

Even taking coauthored papers separately, r is just a modest .44.