The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology
Open accessAbstract
Having recognized that variation around the population-level “Golden Mean” of labile traits contains biologically meaningful information, behavioural ecologists have focused increasingly on exploring the causes and consequences of individual variation in behaviour. These are exciting new directions for the field, assisted in no small part by the adoption of mixed-effects modelling techniques that enable the partitioning of among- and within-individual behavioural variation. It has become commonplace to extract predictions of individual random effects from such models for use in subsequent analyses (for example, between a personality trait and other individual traits such as cognition, physiology, or fitness-related measures). However, these predictions are made with large amounts of error that is not carried forward, rendering further tests susceptible to spurious P values from these individual-level point estimates. We briefly summarize the problems with such statistical methods that are used regularly by behavioural ecologists, and highlight the robust solutions that exist within the mixed model framework, providing tutorials to aid in their implementation.
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
Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v067.i01 · Cited by 86,835
MCMC Methods for Multi-Response Generalized Linear Mixed Models: The MCMCglmmR Package
Hadfield, J. D. (2010) · Journal of Statistical Software · doi:10.18637/jss.v033.i02 · Cited by 4,799
Behavioral syndromes: an ecological and evolutionary overview
Sih, A., Bell, A., & Johnson, J. C. (2004) · Trends in Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1016/j.tree.2004.04.009 · Cited by 2,861
That BLUP is a Good Thing: The Estimation of Random Effects
Robinson, G. K. (1991) · Statistical Science · doi:10.1214/ss/1177011926 · Cited by 1,686
Personality and the emergence of the pace-of-life syndrome concept at the population level
Réale, D., Garant, D., Humphries, M. M., Bergeron, P., Careau, V., & Montiglio, P.-O. (2010) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0208 · Cited by 1,446
Quantifying individual variation in behaviour: mixed‐effect modelling approaches
Dingemanse, N. J., & Dochtermann, N. A. (2013) · Journal of Animal Ecology · doi:10.1111/1365-2656.12013 · Cited by 1,081
A simple method for distinguishing within- versus between-subject effects using mixed models
van de Pol, M., & Wright, J. (2009) · Animal Behaviour · doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.11.006 · Cited by 951
The evolutionary ecology of individual phenotypic plasticity in wild populations
NUSSEY, D. H., WILSON, A. J., & BROMMER, J. E. (2007) · Journal of Evolutionary Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01300.x · Cited by 889
Self-citationGuidelines for estimating repeatability
Wolak, M. E., Fairbairn, D. J., & Paulsen, Y. R. (2012) · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · doi:10.1111/j.2041-210x.2011.00125.x · Cited by 717
Animal personality: what are behavioural ecologists measuring?
Carter, A. J., Feeney, W. E., Marshall, H. H., Cowlishaw, G., & Heinsohn, R. (2013) · Biological Reviews · doi:10.1111/brv.12007 · Cited by 712
Cited by
A brief introduction to mixed effects modelling and multi-model inference in ecology
Harrison, X. A., Donaldson, L., Correa-Cano, M. E., Evans, J., Fisher, D. N., Goodwin, C. E. D., Robinson, B. S., Hodgson, D. J., & Inger, R. (2018) · PeerJ · doi:10.7717/peerj.4794 · Cited by 2,094
Northrup, J. M., Vander Wal, E., Bonar, M., Fieberg, J., Laforge, M. P., Leclerc, M., Prokopenko, C. M., & Gerber, B. D. (2022) · Ecological Applications · doi:10.1002/eap.2470 · Cited by 227
“…mean resource availability and the point estimates (β coefficient) from the selection functions (e.g., Northrup et al. 2016), which fail to appropriately propagate parameter uncertainty, leading to inappropriate variance in the functional response (Hadfield et al. 2010, Houslay and Wilson 2017).”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Houslay, T. M., & Wilson, A. J.
- Venue
- Behavioral Ecology
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2017-03-02
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 948-952
- ISSN
- 1045-2249 (ISSN-L)
- 1465-7279
- OpenAlex
- W2592003945
- Cited by
- 312
- References
- 77
- FWCI
- 24.06
- 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: Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/beheco/arx023
- The paper
- Houslay, T. M., & Wilson, A. J. (2017). Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology. Behavioral Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arx023
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.