Working for the Weekends?

Science academics are notoriously composed of workaholics motivated by gaining that slight competitive edge for the limited number of postdocs, grants, tenure track jobs, etc. This pressure trickles down to the grad student level where there is a mutual respect in the exchanged glances of those folks hanging around the lab on Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Advisors, PIs, and collaborators seem proud when they catch you emailing on the weekend. I've even heard of a sign hanging on the entrance of one very productive lab group that reads "If you're not here on Sunday, don't come back on Monday"!

 Well... while messing around on Google Trends during a Nimbios workshop this week, I discovered that you can actually observed a scientific weekend in Google search data.

 Below, you can check out the last 90 days of Google searches for the terms "science" and "nature" within the US. Notice the cyclic pattern. What are those giant dips? Saturday and Sunday!

One Excel spreadsheet and a few estimations from Google AdWords later, I found that from Wednesday (mid-week) to Saturday, the number of google searches drops about 15% for the term "nature", and a whopping 30% for "science"! On average (according to my cursory estimations), "science" is googled 545,000 times a day in the US. So, in general, "science" is googled 190,000 times less on Saturday than it is through the weekdays. "Nature" drops by 25,000 from it's average of 160,000.

I'm not completely sure how to interpret these results, so I think I'll take the comforting view: At least some scientists stop working as much on the weekends, so it's OK if you want to stay away from the office.

You also might notice that science seems to be on the decline since May. I suppose that makes sense; after all, school's out for the summer... ... for some people.

NOTE: Same qualitative pattern holds for a worldwide analysis and for the search term "science journal"