Tools of the data detective: A review of statistical methods to detect data and result anomalies in psychology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In psychology, it is largely assumed that researchers collect real data and analyze them honestly-that is, it is assumed that data fabrication seldom occurs. While data fabrication is a rare phenomenon, estimates suggest that it occurs frequently enough to be a concern. To this end, statistical tools have been created to detect and deter data fabrication. Often, these tools either assess raw data, or assess summary statistical information. However, very few studies have attempted to review these tools, and of those that have, certain tools were excluded. The purpose of the present study was to review a collection of existing statistical tools to detect data fabrication, assess their strengths and limitations, and consider their place in psychological practice. The major strengths of the tools included their comprehensiveness and rigor, while their limitations were in their stringent criteria to run and in that they were impractical to implement.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.049 | 0.133 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".