p Hacking: More than you ever wish to know

I recently received an email telling me that an article I had reviewed for a journal had achieved 10,000 views. The astonishing thing was that the email arrived less than 3 weeks after the article had been published online! Believe me, not many papers are viewed by so many readers in anything like this brief time!

The article is here, and the title is:

“Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking”

The authors are a distinguished group of Dutch researchers. In the article, they work systematically through every stage of a research project, identifying all the ways that researcher choice might lead to distortion and bias. This is the kind of careful, detailed analysis we need, to take Open Science practices to the next level of precision.

It’s wonderful that so many folks chose to view the article; I hope that just as many, and more, benefit from its advice about how to avoid p hacking.

Incidentally, the online journal Frontiers in Psychology always makes public the names of the editor and reviewers responsible for guiding revision and accepting an article for publication. That’s one more desirable aspect of openness.

Geoff

P.S. Here’s the full reference:

Wicherts, J. M., Veldkamp, C. L. S., Augusteijn, H. E. M., Bakker, M., van Aert, R. C. M., van Assen, M. A. L. M. (2016). Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1832 doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832