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Record W2164150544 · doi:10.1037/a0029487

The ironic effect of significant results on the credibility of multiple-study articles.

2012· article· en· W2164150544 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenuePsychological Methods · 2012
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicBehavioral Health and Interventions
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsCredibilityReplication (statistics)Statistical powerSample size determinationPublicationPsychologyExtrasensory perceptionReplicateSample (material)Power (physics)StatisticsEconometricsStatistical hypothesis testingSocial psychologyMathematicsMedicineLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Cohen (1962) pointed out the importance of statistical power for psychology as a science, but statistical power of studies has not increased, while the number of studies in a single article has increased. It has been overlooked that multiple studies with modest power have a high probability of producing nonsignificant results because power decreases as a function of the number of statistical tests that are being conducted (Maxwell, 2004). The discrepancy between the expected number of significant results and the actual number of significant results in multiple-study articles undermines the credibility of the reported results, and it is likely that questionable research practices have contributed to the reporting of too many significant results (Sterling, 1959). The problem of low power in multiple-study articles is illustrated using Bem's (2011) article on extrasensory perception and Gailliot et al.'s (2007) article on glucose and self-regulation. I conclude with several recommendations that can increase the credibility of scientific evidence in psychological journals. One major recommendation is to pay more attention to the power of studies to produce positive results without the help of questionable research practices and to request that authors justify sample sizes with a priori predictions of effect sizes. It is also important to publish replication studies with nonsignificant results if these studies have high power to replicate a published finding.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.015
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.750
Threshold uncertainty score0.559

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0150.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.292
GPT teacher head0.565
Teacher spread0.273 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it