In the process of writing a short piece for the APS Observer, I was fiddling around with Google Correlate earlier this evening. It’s a very neat toy, but if you think neuroimaging or genetics have a big multiple comparisons problem, playing with Google Correlate for a few minutes will put things in perspective. Here’s a line graph displaying the search term most strongly correlated (over time) with searches for “neuroinformatics”:
That’s right, the search term that covaries most strongly with “neuroinformatics” is none other than “Illinois film office” (which, to be fair, has a pretty appealing website). Other top matches include “wma support”, “sim codes”, “bed-in-a-bag”, “neopets secret”, “neopets guild”, and “neopets secret avatars”.
IÂ may not have learned much about neuroinformatics from this exercise, but I did get a pretty good sense of how neuroinformaticians like to spend their free time…
p.s. I was pretty surprised to find that normalized search volume for just about every informatics-related term has fallen sharply in the last 10 years. I went in expecting the opposite! Maybe all the informaticians were early search adopters, and the rest of the world caught up? No, probably not. Anyway, enough of this;Â Neopia is calling me!
p.p.s. Seriously though, this is why data fishing expeditions are dangerous. Any one of these correlations is significant at p-less-than-point-whatever-you-like. And if your publication record depended on it, you could probably tell yourself a convincing story about why neuroinformaticians need to look up Garmin eMaps…