Stephens et al. (2005)

Stephens et al. (2005) listed as one of the 100 most influential papers of the 17,000+ papers published in the British Ecological Society's journals over the past 100 years. The list of influential papers has been compiled to mark the Society's Centenary.  Phil Stephens wrote the chosen paper with Steve Buskirk, Greg Hayward and Carlos Martinez del Rio (all then at the University of Wyoming). Phil says that "[this paper] emerged from lunchtime discussions about the zeal with which some ecologists were promoting information theoretic model selection as an alternative to null hypothesis testing. Then, as now, we understood the motivation to apply strong pressure to break ecology's dependence on null hypothesis testing. Nevertheless, we emphasised that null hypothesis testing could still play a role in ecological analysis, whilst much remained to be done to improve the application and understanding of information theoretic approaches."