Correcting Corrupt Research: Recommendations for the Profession to Stop Misuse of p-Values

ABSTRACT

p-Values and Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST), combined with a large number of institutional factors, jointly define the Generally Accepted Soft Social Science Publishing Process (GASSSPP) that is now dominant in the social sciences and is increasingly used elsewhere. The case against NHST and the GASSSPP has been abundantly articulated over past decades, and yet it continues to spread, supported by a large number of self-reinforcing institutional processes. In this article, the author presents a number of steps that may be taken to counter the spread of this corruption that directly address the institutional forces, both as individuals and through collaborative efforts. While individual efforts are indispensable to this undertaking, the author argues that these alone cannot succeed unless the institutional forces are also addressed. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

KEYWORDS:

• Corrupt research
• Generally Accepted Soft-Social-Science Publishing Process (GASSSPP)
• Peer review
• p-Values
• Reform
• Replication

Notes

Notes

1 The literature on misinterpretation and misuse of p-values is quite large, and such misuse is but a part of the problem with corrupt research. In the interest of providing full scholarly support for these arguments without excessive demand for journal page space, I have provided only a select set of references at the end of this article, while providing full references in the supplement material. Wherever I refer to more literature than that immediately cited, I cite these as “refs” and provide the number(s) for the publication as enumerated in the supplement material, which provides the full citation(s) for the work(s).

2 Refs. 7, 14, 24, 33, 37, 50, 51, 52, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 74, 80, 91, 95, 97, 102, 111, 117, 132, 142, 147, 148, 152 (supplementary material).

3 Refs. 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 22, 23, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 42, 51, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 65, 70, 71, 73, 79, 80, 84, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 123, 136, 138, 139, 140, 145, 152, among others—this list is not exhaustive (supplementary material).