50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistical error.

Re:50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistica... by mbreese on Monday November 28, 2011 @02:20PM (#3287177)

These aren't errors that would be caused my manipulating your data. If you were manipulating your data, you'd have made sure that your results were significant with the correct tests. These are errors where people didn't use the proper test.

At the worst, you could only claim that people only submitted the results of the test that made their research look better than it otherwise would have been (with the correct test).

In this case, I think it is more of an issue with the reviewers catching the problems than the authors deliberately misleading.

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Re:50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistica... by jvm on Monday November 28, 2011 @10:22PM (#3288866)

Actually, in the case of this specific error, reviewers are often shut down by editors who want to publish the finding. It happened to my friend's advisor recently: she called them out for it and the editor said it would be published anyway.

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Re:50% of neuroscience papers suffer from a major statistica... by jules on Monday November 28, 2011 @03:22PM (#3287447)

Actually, that is a huge problem. You have to decide on the test you are going to use before you see the data. After you've seen the data you can always come up with a specially made statistical test that will prove anything you want with any p-value you want.

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