Data Come First: Discussion of “Co-citation and Co-authorship Networks of Statisticians”

Abstract

I salute the authors for their gift to the world of this new dataset! They have clearly invested plenty of time, effort, and IQ points in the study of the statistics literature as a bibliometric laboratory, and our field will grow and develop because of this dataset, as well as methodology the authors developed and/or fine-tuned with those data. Strikingly, the article also conveys a great deal of enthusiasm for the data! This seems such a departure from the pattern of many articles in statistics today. The enthusiastic spirit reminds me of some classic work by great figures in the history of statistics, who often were fascinated by new kinds of data which were just becoming available in their day, and who were inspired by the new data to invent fundamental new statistical tools and mathematical machinery. Francis Galton was interested in the relationships between father’s height and son’s height, himself compiling an extensive bivariate dataset of such heights, leading to the invention of the bivariate normal distribution and the correlation coefficient. Time and time again, new types of data came first, new types of models and methodology later. Indeed, this seems almost inevitable. As new technologies come onstream, new kinds of measurements become available, and new settings for data analysis and statistical inference emerge. This is plain to see in recent decades, where computational biology produced gene expression data, DNA sequence data, SNP data, and RNA-Seq data, each new data type leading to interesting methodological challenges and scientific progress. For me, each effort by a statistics researcher to understand a newly available type of data enlarges our field; it should be a primary part of the career of statisticians to cultivate an interest in cultivating new types of datasets, so that new methodology can be discovered and developed.