Mathematical illiteracy impedes progress in biology
- Nakul Chitnisa,1 and
- Thomas A. Smithb
- aDepartment of Epidemiology and Public Health, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, 4002 Basel, Switzerland; and
- bUniversität Basel, 4003 Basel, Switzerland
Fawcett and Higginson (1) have shown that citation rates of biology papers with equations in the main text are lower than those of papers without equations. They claim that this implies “heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists” and recommend that equations be moved to appendixes to improve citation rates. We suggest that a better interpretation of their results would be “mathematical illiteracy impedes progress in biology.”
The authors base their conclusion on the …
↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: nakul.chitnis{at}unibas.ch.
