Is a Lunar Research Revolution on The Way?

Title: Lunar Effect Bibliography
Author: Peter J. Marko

New Lunar Effect Bibliography to aid and abet this development

Get ready for a fresh assault on dogged claims that the Moon has naught to do with those cyclical patterns that roil our emotions and rile our senses at every layer of our being.

Canadian research astrologer Peter J. Marko warns of a looming revolution that has potential to dramatically influence the way investigators approach their inquiries into all things Luna. To aid and abet this development, he has published The Lunar Effect Bibliography, a categorized, annotated and indexed list of publications on how the Moon affects our lives.

Three factors are at work fomenting the revolution in lunar research, he says.
“Research tools are continuing to improve at an exponential rate and we are on the verge of artificial intelligence technology hitting mainstream. The scientific community is gradually opening up to more and more so-called fringe ideas, including astrology, he said. “Also, future generations will not be actively distorting and hindering lunar effect research in the way their counterparts have done earlier.”

The new bibliography contains a total of 338 references to works dealing with lunar influences on humans. Of these, 266 sources are journal articles. And 185 papers (67 percent) can be considered a primary source, meaning they report original research findings. Secondary sources summarize and review primary sources.

“Each year sees the publication of four or five papers on the topic. So it’s probably safe to say that many more scientific articles on the lunar effect will be forthcoming in the years ahead,” he said.

Of the 185 primary source studies included in the book, 79 provided support for the existence of a lunar effect. Eight had inconclusive or indifferent findings, and 98 could not identify any lunar influence.

A Political Battlefield

“But there is more to this story,” he said. “Lunar effect research is viewed by some scientists as a political battlefield. Ergo, many of the papers are biased, incomplete or flawed.”

In his Lunar Effect Bibliography, Marko identified 13 such papers that claimed not to find support for the existence of a lunar effect. However, when it was later demonstrated that these 13 papers should actually be counted with those on the positive side of the ledger, the final tally was 92 papers supporting the existence of lunar influence compared with 85 papers that did not.

Lunar research has covered everything from reproduction to crime, behavior, health, accidents, personality and finance. Researchers have had mixed results with all of these subject areas except finance. In this category, eight original research papers on stock market performance and lunar cycles have had strong positive findings, without exception.

“Financial data is measurable and objective, which means that research results are more likely to hold up in replication. And this is exactly what is happening,” Marko said.
“The original research of Dichev and James (2001) examining stock markets in 25 countries was replicated by Yuan, Zeng and Zhu (2006) for 48 countries. The essential nature of findings was the same in both studies, which showed stock market returns higher around the new moon than the full moon.

“Still another study by Keef and Khaled (2011) looked at 62 stock indices around the world and also was able to replicate the earlier findings. My expectation is that future research on financial markets will show more linkages to lunar influences,” he said.

A Complex Subject

Marko thinks human reproduction is the lunar research area where we’ll likely see more positive results in the near future. A development to watch is the growing awareness by researchers that the lunar effect is much more complex than something unusual happening at the full Moon.

For example, researchers have shown that the lunar effect is not restricted to the Moon’s synodic (monthly) cycle. Also, we’ve learned men and women appear to respond to Moon differently. And if there are tidal effects in humans they should occur twice every lunar day following the semi diurnal tide and twice ever synodic month following the lunar phases, he said.

“A number of authors have commented on how spectral analysis will yield more meaningful results. At the moment, too much lunar research is binary. And this applies to all of astrology as well,” he said. “The Moon’s influence on our lives has been heavily debated by scholars, skeptics, medical professionals, research astrologers, and astronomers for the past several decades. At this time, literature on the lunar effect is scattered across 150 journals involving approximately 700 authors without a single publication dedicated to the subject.

“It is very challenging to come to scientific consensus on any topic under such circumstances. Until now not even a bibliography existed. The Lunar Effect Bibliography fills this gap and hopefully becomes a landmark publication in the field.”