Data link roundup (week of January 18, 2013)

The week's top data analysis links...

APPLIED DEMOGRAPHY TOOLBOX

Have you ever had to build a median calculator from scratch? Or build a population pyramid in Excel (pesky axis formatting!)? Eddie Hunsinger's collection of links in the Applied Demography Toolbox might be a time-saver.

WHO'S CITIED?

Rafael Pereira summarizes the Most Cited Authors in Sociology. The takeaway points:

• Foucault is cited more than four times as often as Durkheim
• Analytical weakness: Google Scholar citation tracker only tracks registered authors
• If you haven't registered with Google Scholar, you might want to consider it. (The metrics I found for my own citations were worth the 30 seconds it took to sign up.)

GRAYEST GENERATION

Thursday's edition of Fresh Air featured a segment on "The Grayest Generation" -- the demographic trend of delayed childbirth in the United States.

In a December article for The New Republic, "The Grayest Generation: How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society," the magazine's science editor Judith Shulevitz points out how the growing trend toward later parenthood since 1970 coincides with a rise in neurocognitive and developmental disorders among children.

To be honest, the cognitive issues Terri Gross discussed with Shulevitz were less interesting to me than Shulevitz's sociological commentary on career path and delayed childbirth. As a whole, the interview is fascinating. (Full disclosure: Really, I'm just a fan of any headline news story that involves a detailed discussion of demographic trends...)

GETTING PUBLISHED

If you want to know the key to publication, here are two hints:

Add formulas to your abstracts and articles (even if they are irrelevant). New research in the Journal of Judgment and Decision Making shows that non-math-trained reviewers judged papers to be "of higher quality" when the abstract included a formula.

Stop using the word "paper" (also stop using the words and phrases: preliminary, seeks to, attempts, etc...). Start using the word "article" (and also consider including words: hypothesis, tests, and finds)... at least according to Scatterplot.

BEST CHART OF THE WEEK

Eric Fischer maps language communities among Twitter users.

Source: Eric Fischer