ReviewProceedings. Biological sciences2024
Overcoming the pitfalls of categorizing continuous variables in ecology, evolution and behaviour.
Review in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Systematic review of risk prediction models for catheter-associated urinary tract infection.Frontiers in public health · 2026Pooled it
- Enhanced Bayesian Spline Regression Approach for Modelling Trends in Infections Caused by Pathogens Commonly Transmitted Through Food.Zoonoses (Shannon, Ireland) · 2026Article
- The relationship between academic achievement, health behaviors, and school climate among university students.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Connecting links with code: AI in morphological evolution.Frontiers in bioinformatics · 2026Review
- Palliative psychological care in Germany: Results of a national online survey with psychologists and psycho-oncologists in specialist palliative care settings.Palliative care and social practice · 2026Article
- Assortative breeding experiment in a songbird suggests telomere length is determined during early life rather than at conception.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Childhood allostatic load predicts cardiometabolic health in adulthood.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Divergent evolution of colony-level metabolic scaling in ants.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- To bin or not to bin: why parasite abundance data should not be lumped into categories for statistical analysis.Parasitology · 2025Review
- Quantifying the scale dependence of primary productivity-species-richness relationships.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Overcoming the pitfalls of categorizing continuous variables in ecology, evolution and behaviour.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Many variables in biological research-from body size to life-history timing to environmental characteristics-are measured continuously (e.g. body mass in kilograms) but analysed as categories (e.g. large versus small), which can lower statistical power and change interpretation. We conducted a mini-review of 72 recent publications in six popular ecology, evolution and behaviour journals to quantify the prevalence of categorization. We then summarized commonly categorized metrics and simulated a dataset to demonstrate the drawbacks of categorization using common variables and realistic examples. We show that categorizing continuous variables is common (31% of publications reviewed). We also underscore that predictor variables can and should be collected and analysed continuously. Finally, we provide recommendations on how to keep variables continuous throughout the entire scientific process. Together, these pieces comprise an actionable guide to increasing statistical power and facilitating large synthesis studies by simply leaving continuous variables alone. Overcoming the pitfalls of categorizing continuous variables will allow ecologists, ethologists and evolutionary biologists to continue making trustworthy conclusions about natural processes, along with predictions about their responses to climate change and other environmental contexts.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.