Agreed.<p>I think it&#x27;s arguable that, when the question you&#x27;re asking is &#x27;how well do X and Y two things correlate with each other&#x27;, the statistic you should be giving is <i>r</i> (which here is 0.49), not <i>r^2</i>. <i>r^2</i> is the proportion of the variance of Y that&#x27;s explained by X -- not that that isn&#x27;t an interesting thing, but ITSM the correlation coefficient is more to what people expect a measure of relationship to be. (IANAStatistician)