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The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals
In order to study the prevalence, nature (direction), and causes of reporting errors in psychology, we checked the consistency of reported test statistics, degrees of freedom, and p values in a random sample of high- and low-impact psychology journals. In a second study, we established the generalit...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer-Verlag
2011
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21494917 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0089-5 |
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author | Bakker, Marjan Wicherts, Jelte M. |
author_facet | Bakker, Marjan Wicherts, Jelte M. |
author_sort | Bakker, Marjan |
collection | PubMed |
description | In order to study the prevalence, nature (direction), and causes of reporting errors in psychology, we checked the consistency of reported test statistics, degrees of freedom, and p values in a random sample of high- and low-impact psychology journals. In a second study, we established the generality of reporting errors in a random sample of recent psychological articles. Our results, on the basis of 281 articles, indicate that around 18% of statistical results in the psychological literature are incorrectly reported. Inconsistencies were more common in low-impact journals than in high-impact journals. Moreover, around 15% of the articles contained at least one statistical conclusion that proved, upon recalculation, to be incorrect; that is, recalculation rendered the previously significant result insignificant, or vice versa. These errors were often in line with researchers’ expectations. We classified the most common errors and contacted authors to shed light on the origins of the errors. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3174372 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2011 |
publisher | Springer-Verlag |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-31743722011-09-26 The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals Bakker, Marjan Wicherts, Jelte M. Behav Res Methods Article In order to study the prevalence, nature (direction), and causes of reporting errors in psychology, we checked the consistency of reported test statistics, degrees of freedom, and p values in a random sample of high- and low-impact psychology journals. In a second study, we established the generality of reporting errors in a random sample of recent psychological articles. Our results, on the basis of 281 articles, indicate that around 18% of statistical results in the psychological literature are incorrectly reported. Inconsistencies were more common in low-impact journals than in high-impact journals. Moreover, around 15% of the articles contained at least one statistical conclusion that proved, upon recalculation, to be incorrect; that is, recalculation rendered the previously significant result insignificant, or vice versa. These errors were often in line with researchers’ expectations. We classified the most common errors and contacted authors to shed light on the origins of the errors. Springer-Verlag 2011-04-15 2011 /pmc/articles/PMC3174372/ /pubmed/21494917 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0089-5 Text en © The Author(s) 2011 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Article Bakker, Marjan Wicherts, Jelte M. The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title | The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title_full | The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title_fullStr | The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title_full_unstemmed | The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title_short | The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
title_sort | (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21494917 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0089-5 |
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