ought to be retracted, it is using the same ad-hoc methods that we used to wrongly fit power laws to statistical distributions when I was a grad student 30 years ago. I wrote a trash paper too and I'm still angry about not feeling psychologically safe to bring the issue up.
A postdoc who was there wrote a paper many years later about the right way to do it
I don't think anybody read it. Note that the Science paper uses the "Pearson product moment correlation" which is "can only be used to measure the relationship between two variables which are both normally distributed" -- and there's nothing normally distributed here.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055
ought to be retracted, it is using the same ad-hoc methods that we used to wrongly fit power laws to statistical distributions when I was a grad student 30 years ago. I wrote a trash paper too and I'm still angry about not feeling psychologically safe to bring the issue up.
A postdoc who was there wrote a paper many years later about the right way to do it
https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062
I don't think anybody read it. Note that the Science paper uses the "Pearson product moment correlation" which is "can only be used to measure the relationship between two variables which are both normally distributed" -- and there's nothing normally distributed here.