Hi, I'm a reporter for Science magazine doing a story about the increasing use of Bayesian approaches in many fields. I'm interested in hearing from anyone on this list on two issues: 1) Thoughts on why the Bayesian approach is growing in popularity, and examples of particularly important, exciting, or easy to understand applications that demonstrate a major difference from frequentist approaches. Also, any examples or thoughts on whether the old frequentist/Bayesian debates are increasing, dying out, or moving to new ground. 2) I've heard many times that "Bayesians can come up with different answers to the same problems." I'd like to throw out a "problem" and a data set that will be used to illustrate my story. Here is the question: How many papers with "Bayes" or some variant in the title or abstract will be published this year by the 6,000 science and social science publications tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. The data: Here is the information I already have from ISS: Year # Bayes papers 1991 606 1992 631 1993 705 1994 862 1995 865 1996 1028 1997 1139 1998 1158 1999* 1110 (*thru 9/30/99) Here is what else I know: In 1991, there were 695,688 papers total in the sciences only. In 1998, there were 954,761 papers total in the sciences only. >From 91 to 98, there was a 37.2% increase overall in the number of science papers, but about a 91% increase in the Bayes papers (I haven't checked this math, got it from Institute for Scientific Information in Philly). So, the question is, what will the number of Bayes papers for 1999 be? I'm also interested in hearing how frequentists might answer this problem. I need the answers by early next week (the week of 10/11) or sooner. Thanks! Any and all other comments/questions welcome. David A. Malakoff Reporter, Science Magazine (www.sciencemag.org) 1200 New York Avenue NW Washington DC 20005 (202) 326-6446 (fax) 371-9227 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Alternate email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
