The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as something more interesting. The following list is culled from peer-reviewed journal articles in which (a) the authors set themselves the threshold of 0.05 for significance, (b) failed to achieve that threshold value for p and (c) described it in such a way as to make it seem more...
If you have ALS, what is a statistically significant result?
For people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which attacks the body’s motor neurons and renders a person unable to move, swallow or breathe, the search for an effective treatment has been a crushing disappointment. The only drug available for the disease, approved two decades ago, typically extends life just a few months. Then in the fall, a small California biotech company named Genervon began...
Evidence of p-hacking in ed policy research and the What Works Clearinghouse
I am really looking forward to this paper: This article presents a pre-analysis plan for analyzing the evidential value in a selection of policy research taken from scholarly journals and two research clearinghouses run by the federal government. The analysis will collect p-values from selected studies and estimate the evidential value that they represent using the newly introduced p-curve. This...
Most cited paper of all time …
Would be Fisher’s if people cited him every time they used a p value: The p-value is the most widely-known statistic. P-values are reported in a large majority of scientific publications that measure and report data. R.A. Fisher is widely credited with inventing the p-value. If he was cited every time a p-value was reported his paper would have, at the very least, 3 million citations*...
I dream of low p values
But at least I am not a p-hacker: Nature on how p values are used and abused in research.