Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Some sobering statistics about psychological data

I've been catching up on some of the recent articles that have dealt with data quality issues in psychology. Here are three sobering statistics:

  1. By some estimates, only about 1% of papers published in psychology since 1900 have involved replications (Makel et al., 2012).
  2. Under certain not unreasonable assumptions, approximately one-third of published results in psychology may be false positives (Pashler & Harris, 2012).
  3. Even for recently published papers, approximately 70% of requests for raw data end in failure (Wicherts et al., 2006).
So, if your research depends on a previous result (and whose doesn't to some extent?), start your experiment series with a direct replication, and publish your raw data.

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