Editor
Jordan Anaya
Tim van der Zee, Jordan Anaya, Nicholas J L Brown
This article is a good paradigm for how to perform a detailed investigation of suspected errors/misconduct.
After the senior author announced on his own blog how much p-hacking was involved in the generation of these articles we were interested to take a look at them, since in our experience one questionable research practice is often accompanied by other QRPs, errors, or worse.
We started by noticing that an unprecedented percentage of means and SDs in the tables were mathematically impossible, then quickly discovered a litany of additional problems. Sample sizes changed throughout the articles and between articles, degrees of freedom changed and were impossible, numbers which should have been the same changed within the same article and between articles, test statistics were impossible, the study was described inconsistently between the articles, and some data directly contradicted the description of the study.
None of the techniques employed in our article are new, although incorporating rounding uncertainty in the recalculation of test statistics may be novel.
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