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I just found the paper by Halford and Hsu, that describes the effect that the appearance of companies' CEOs have on the stock value of said company after public appearances of the CEO. They were able to confirm the correlation and gave sufficient evidence to suggest causation.

Even though the scientific community tends to think it soars above the normal, human things that people do or concern themselves with, being human beings comes with its set of deficiencies. I have tried to find articles that try to analyse the impact of conference talks with respect to the appearance of the person giving the talk, but my searches came up empty.

I cannot believe that we are able to fully dissociate content and appearance (this goes for written communication as well) from each other to come to a neutral, unbiased judgement about the content.

I am interested if there are known cases of bias of the scientific community in general, and possibly your discipline in particular, which value the contributions by their peers differently, depending on how they look.

Basically, since the question in the title is rather broad, it boils down to this: Is there correlation between beauty and citation count? If someone can dig up a paper that describes and checks this, I would be grateful.

tschoppi
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    If you expand appearance to mean more than just "beauty" there may be correlations with height. See e.g. these reports: [1] and [2] as examples. PS, I am not tall. – Peter Jansson Apr 28 '14 at 16:40
  • Does appearance mean beauty, how smartly dressed one is, or both? – gerrit Apr 28 '14 at 16:56
  • @gerrit With appearance I really mean the overall appearance, but I wanted to narrow the question down to beauty to fit the format. You may feel free to address appearance in general in your answer. – tschoppi Apr 28 '14 at 16:57
  • If you wanted to do the correlation yourself you could probably use the number of chillies from rate my professor dot com as a proxy for beauty. – StrongBad Apr 28 '14 at 17:39
  • Related: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17363/are-search-committees-biased-in-terms-of-a-candidates-looks-such-as-long-hair –  Apr 28 '14 at 18:15
  • Related fact that can put the question into a different light: beauty is correlated with intelligence. – Federico Poloni Apr 30 '14 at 22:46
  • I think it is vastly more likely that there is a correlation between the prettyness/size/readability of a font used in the paper and/or how neatly the paper is formatted and the citation count or other similar measures. There is also a correlation between a paper being available online and its citation count (I recall, there was research on that). As far as the appearance of a person goes, at least in the math community stereotypical geniuses are often weird-looking, while an "attractive" presenter is more likely to draw people's attention away from the content, meaning no citations. –  May 01 '14 at 03:07

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I doubt how a scientific study could measure "beauty", in order to conduct the study. Perhaps human labelled? A study that would like body mass index to citations perhaps is a research waiting to be done!

Yet, unlike CEOs, you don't see the authors when reading a paper. Altough, being popular at conferences might help them get initial citation count.

Go for it :)

dorien
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