Every week, we select a recently published Open Access article to feature. This week’s article is from the International Statistical Review and looks at questionable statistical research practices.
The article’s abstract is given below, with the full article available to read here.
, and (2022) Unlucky Number 13? Manipulating Evidence Subject to Snooping. International Statistical Review, https://doi.org/10.1111/insr.12488.
Questionable research practices have generated considerable recent interest throughout and beyond the scientific community. We subsume such practices involving secret data snooping that influences subsequent statistical inference under the term MESSing (manipulating evidence subject to snooping) and discuss, illustrate and quantify the possibly dramatic effects of several forms of MESSing using an empirical and a simple theoretical example. The empirical example uses numbers from the most popular German lottery, which seem to suggest that 13 is an unlucky number.