The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A comparison of association indices
Open accessAbstract
Indices used to measure the frequency of association between individuals in fission/fusion societies are frequently borrowed from ecological studies of species association without adequate justification. In this paper several such indices, under specific conditions likely to be encountered in field studies of animal behaviour, are examined. Each of three indices commonly found in the literature is shown through simulations to be accurate over only a narrow range of possible sampling biases. As an alternative approach, examples are given of the derivation of a maximum-likelihood estimator based on two simple models. Both models assume that a constant proportion of existing subgroups is located. In the first model all combinations of subgroups are equally likely to be located, while in the second model the probability of locating one subgroup is allowed to differ from that of the others. The maximum-likelihood estimators are shown to be less biased and to have lower variance than the other three indices under the assumptions of the models.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Observational study of behavior: sampling methods
Altmann, J. (1974) · Behaviour · doi:10.1163/156853974x00534 · Cited by 13,891
Measures of the Amount of Ecologic Association Between Species
Dice, L. R. (1945) · Ecology · doi:10.2307/1932409 · Cited by 11,874
An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics
(1911) · Nature · doi:10.1038/087345a0 · Cited by 4,394
The Behaviour of Ungulates and Its Relation to Management
Hirst, S. M., Geist, V., & Walther, F. R. (1975) · The Journal of Wildlife Management · doi:10.2307/3799933 · Cited by 420
Ekman, J. (1979) · Ornis Scandinavica · doi:10.2307/3676345 · Cited by 182
Computational Methods for Data Analysis
Grove, S. D. (1979) · Journal of the Operational Research Society · doi:10.1057/jors.1979.87 · Cited by 167
Morgan, B. J. T., Simpson, M. J. A., Hanby, J. P., & Hall‐Craggs, J. (1976) · Behaviour · doi:10.1163/156853976x00280 · Cited by 134
Random Individual Association and Social Group Instability in American Bison (Bison bison)
Lott, D. F., & Minta, S. C. (1983) · Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie · doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1983.tb01335.x · Cited by 87
Social organization and behaviour of giraffe in Tsavo East National Park
Leuthold, B. M. (1979) · African Journal of Ecology · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2028.1979.tb00453.x · Cited by 87
Proximity, Sociality, and Observation: The Definition of Social Groups
Sailer, L., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (1984) · American Anthropologist · doi:10.1525/aa.1984.86.1.02a00080 · Cited by 85
Cited by
The emergent properties of a dolphin social network
Lusseau, D. (2003) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0057 · Cited by 844
The socioecology of elephants: analysis of the processes creating multitiered social structures
Wittemyer, G., Douglas-Hamilton, I., & Getz, W. M. (2005) · Animal Behaviour · doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.08.018 · Cited by 591
Whitehead, H., & Dufault, S. (1999) · Advances in the Study of Behavior · doi:10.1016/s0065-3454(08)60215-6 · Cited by 398
GOBUSH, K. S., MUTAYOBA, B. M., & WASSER, S. K. (2008) · Conservation Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.01035.x · Cited by 180
Inferring social network structure in ecological systems from spatio-temporal data streams
Psorakis, I., Roberts, S. J., Rezek, I., & Sheldon, B. C. (2012) · Journal of The Royal Society Interface · doi:10.1098/rsif.2012.0223 · Cited by 171
Metadata
- Authors
- Cairns, S. J., & Schwager, S. J.
- Venue
- Animal Behaviour
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1987-10
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1454-1469
- ISSN
- 0003-3472 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2074351368
- Cited by
- 837
- References
- 13
- FWCI
- 2.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A comparison of association indices. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/s0003-3472(87)80018-0
- The paper
- Cairns, S. J., & Schwager, S. J. (1987). A comparison of association indices. Animal Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-3472(87)80018-0
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.