Concepts of Relative Importance in Recent Scientific Literature
- 1 February 1989
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in The American Statistician
- Vol. 43 (1) , 2-6
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.1989.10475596
Abstract
How is the ambiguous concept of relative importance for independent variables handled in the scientific literature? We sampled from a population of recent papers with relative importance (or the equivalent) in their titles. We found widespread apparent desire to make relative-importance statements, but little self-conscious interest in interpretation or in looking at more than one specification of the concept. We were unhappy to find that a substantial fraction (one-fifth) of the papers used statistical significance to measure relative importance.Keywords
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