Ethics as a field of study is interesting in and of itself, however, there are times when it becomes nearly hilarious. One such case is of a 2009 research article entitled "Do ethicists steal more books?" wherein Eric Schwizgebal sought to determine just that. And determine it he did.
There were two separate studies done without the article, one dealing with the question at hand, and the second one seeing which types of ethics books were at a higher risk. The research specifically looked at the "rates at which ethics books [went] missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity" (Schwizgabel, 2009) to ensure that there weren't a bunch of other factors altering the data.
The first study determined that, yes, books on ethics are more likely to go missing (by 50%, no less!) than ones not about ethics. The second study found out that older books on ethics were 2 times as likely to disappear. Now, while there is a special type of irony in knowing this, I wanted to highlight a very important aspect of research, which is how research needs to be compared in the right way in order to make a distinction.
If you tried to determine how often books that vary wildly in popularity go missing, you might come to an incorrect conclusion. More comic books might go missing, but more of them get checked out, meaning they'd have a different rate of missing-ness. Statistics can be a beautiful thing to study, but you need to understand the differences between raw data and comparable data. If a news site is reporting the raw data only, that should be a red flag. You cannot compare raw data to raw data unless each group contains the exact same number of people, and at that point, you're just looking at comparable fractions.
The headlines for data reporting can also change your perception of it. For example, my title here is pure clickbait. The research was only about philosophy books, so the statement about ethics books going missing more than non-ethics books is misleading. I don't mention what it is in comparison to. Always read as much of the research as you can, don't take someone else's words for it.
Works cited:
Eric Schwitzgebel (2009) Do ethicists steal more books?, Philosophical Psychology, 22:6, 711-725, DOI: 10.1080/09515080903409952