Is
math not your strongest subject? Don't let that hold you back when it
comes to scholarly publishing. Just shove some complex-looking
mathematical expressions into your manuscript. This will improve your
chances of getting into print. Kimmo Ericksson reached this conclusion
after asking reviewers to examine manuscripts with and without
nonsensical math. From her abstract:
In those
disciplines where most researchers do not master mathematics, the use of
mathematics may be held in too much awe. To demonstrate this I
conducted an online experiment with 200 participants, all of which had
experience of reading research reports and a postgraduate degree (in any
subject). Participants were presented with the abstracts from two
published papers (one in evolutionary anthropology and one in
sociology). Based on these abstracts, participants were asked to judge
the quality of the research. Either one or the other of the two
abstracts was manipulated through the inclusion of an extra sentence
taken from a completely unrelated paper and presenting an equation that
made no sense in the context. The abstract that included the meaningless
mathematics tended to be judged of higher quality. However, this
"nonsense math effect" was not found among participants with degrees in
mathematics, science, technology or medicine.
You can read Ericksson's journal article at the link. It has a lot of math that I don't understand, so it must be excellent.
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