[jermaink]

It's just a recommendation to improve the reporting, no general defense of p-values. Pearson does not imply to analyze a causal relationship. I see the point it's not linear (then you would have had a fitted linear reg, I assume) but still can tell you that missing p-values may cause arching eyebrows :)

In small sample sizes, correlation can easily be significant, often at the cost of low confidence. To the opposite, in large sample sizes, the magnitude of the effect may be lower but at higher confidence. In both cases, results have to be interpreted with caution. The recent p-value debate points towards a lot of issues here. For instance, there have been medical studies overestimating correlations in small sample sizes while other authors seemed to underestimate their long-term large-sample results with correlations in the ballpark of 0.15 (p<0.05).