5 ms·

As a layman when it comes to statistics and academia, this is the first I've heard of "publication bias". It seems like a pretty big problem at first glance, es

As a layman when it comes to statistics and academia, this is the first I've heard of "publication bias". It seems like a pretty big problem at first glance, especially if it recurses and calls into question meta-analysis being done to investigate the presence of the bias itself. Sounds like a massive headache. If this problem is as big as it sounds, what are the repercussions?

iQuercus 10y ago
Think about it this way: Suppose my theory is that a fair coin is not actually fair but always lands on heads. If I flip a coin one million times and only publish the ~500,000 results that show coin toss coming up as "heads," I could lead people to believe that a fair coin will always land on heads. That's how misleading this bias can be. But anyone can toss a fair coin, so I'd be found out pretty quick. But with more complicated and murky stuff like psychology this can be a huge problem, especially if people begin using this shaky work as foundation for things like: public policy, how to live their lives, how to do work, etc. After all they can't just toss a coin to check my work on the more complicated stuff.
- tylerkahn 10y ago
  I think what you're describing is just fraud. To take your fair coin example, publication bias is when the only studies that get published are the ones that show an unfairness in the coin – the rest of the studies that simply find 50% heads and 50% tails (aka a fair coin) don't get published because they're not interesting.
  - Taek 10y ago
    Pre-registration solves this issue. If I announce the study before I have the results, we make sure that uninteresting outcomes are published.
    - fao_ 10y ago
      What if funding for a study gets withdrawn because it looks like it'll produce negative/unfavorable results?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        This should be publicly recorded too and maybe eventually we'll have a list of funding bodies that like to minmax profits by damaging research.
        fao_ 10y ago
        This doesn't seem very feasible given the current level of privacy afforded to companies. I don't think there's a way to distinguish between studies that have lost funding because there are genuinely less funds to go around, and foo experiment just happened to be one of the ones that didn't make the cut, and studies that have had the funding pulled for harmful reasons (Like negative results). Mainly because it's devilishly easy to mask; you'd just reduce funding to research and redistribute it into something plausible like marketing. Of course this isn't feasible for lots of studies producing negative results. Of course, one way to counter that is to insist that the data is published regardless, but I'm sure that the data could be hidden with clever use of NDAs and court arguments along the lines of "We need to prohibit the distribution of company assets".
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Yeah, I guess. But something else came to my mind now: > Of course, one way to counter that is to insist that the data is published regardless, but I'm sure that the data could be hidden with clever use of NDAs and court arguments along the lines of "We need to prohibit the distribution of company assets". I find myself more and more treating complexity as a proxy for dishonesty. Companies that are trustworthy seem to have a relatively simple business model that they don't try to hide. The more convoluted it is, the more likely it is someone is scamming you. Wonder if that could be used as an effective metric - the more complex the reason someone weasels away from publishing the data, the more their "reputability" score goes down?
  - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
    > I think what you're describing is just fraud. Fraud requires intent. Now, this extreme of bias would typically require said intent, sure. But let's say the experimenter has anterograde amnesia. They get an idea, flip a coin - oh hey, it's heads! They publish the interesting result. They get an idea, flip a coin - oh, it was tails, nevermind that theory. They get an idea... each time, they don't remember that they've already attempted the theory. No intent, no fraud, just bias. The good news is this is a pretty unlikely extreme in an individual. Anterograde amnesia is rare. The bad news is nobody can remember that someone else attempted a theory and came up with a negative result that they didn't bother to publish, and even individuals will have a hard time perfectly accounting for and preventing their own bias within a single study. The even worse news is that fraud exists as well.
conistonwater 10y ago
It's a rather old subject, and much richer than just publication bias, so there's plenty written about it. There is a good introduction on Andrew Gelman's blog, for example. http://andrewgelman.com/2016/03/05/29195/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/03/05/29195/ http://andrewgelman.com/category/zombies/ http://andrewgelman.com/category/zombies/ In particular, publication bias isn't quite as bad as the garden-of-forking-paths issue.
tdaltonc 10y ago
Yes it's a very big problem. One of my favorite meta analysis tools is used to detect and correct for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot
Houshalter 10y ago
Oh it's far worse than that. Iirc about a third of studies fail to replicate, and in psychology it might be higher. In fact we even have a control group for science. A fake field of research that spends it's time studying phenomena which can't possibly be real, the paranormal researchers. They produce tons of positive results anyway. See The Control Group is Out of Control: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...
- jldugger 10y ago
  Nosek's finding was that half to two thirds fail to replicate: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
- pknight 10y ago
  If your view is a priori that psi effects are impossible all you will see in the studies that 'it must be invalid and flawed or faked'. Yes, this makes people doubt scientific practices in general. You will always feel you are winning that argument, no matter what criteria those scientists meet. But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. Negative results do get published regularly. And more replications take place. It is quite hilarious really, because it makes people panic about what is wrong with the methods we apply across the board in science. Skeptics just raise the bar abritrarily and shift the goalposts as a means of sweeping things under the rug while calling it scientific rigour. We have also now gotten to the point that the fact that we commonly have failed replications (across all social science), it means the whole premise of a line of research must be completely flawed. But we should expect failed replications - for one, it's impossible to repeat a set of circumstances exactly. Many replications aren't true replications.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. So what's a good study you can point me at? The nice thing about psi testing is that you can get a result sample every few seconds. It should be easy to turn even a moderately small effect into a five sigma result that's immune to publication bias.
jldugger 10y ago
The repercussions are pretty depressing for social sciences. Especially Psych, which relies on a lot of "30 undergraduates were recruited" to demonstrate effects. Particularly damaging is that this particular theory (thinking hard leads to drops in blood glucose levels) was widely promoted in the general public; I recall watching a TED talk about it, as well as a pop-sci book. There was an econtalk episode late last year with Brian Nosek about the Reproducability Project (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/brian_nosek_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/brian_nosek_on.html). They went the further step of analyzing the wider field to see how bad the biases are. Previous attempts to call out replication (priming theory) did not go well, leading to a lot of hostility. Nosek's process is a bit more friendly, by inviting the original authors's critique early, before data collection. I figure it's a bit harder to blast the auditors for considering a replication study without appearing as though you doubt the effect is real yourself. They still got a bit of pushback, but nowhere near as acrimonious.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  It sounds like some of these researchers need their own ego depleted, for the sake of science. Critical, well-intentioned analyses of a study by other groups should be a welcome thing, as it will lead to more robust results. It seems like the incentives have gotten way out of whack.
  - jldugger 10y ago
    Bear in mind it's not just ego, but livelihood. People's grant lines and tenure cases rely in part on contributing to the development of the field, and having the basis of your research retracted usually undermines your tenure review and puts a hamper on continued grant funding. So it's not super surprising that people are defensive, but I'm always amazed at how publicly aggressive things can get.
hannob 10y ago
It is an extremely big problem. In medicine all kinds of things were done to avoid publication bias (most notably trials registers). It still is a big problem, because the countermeasures aren't enforced. In most other areas people don't even try to counter it, which means it's probably much worse and we don't know how bad it is. It's a major reason why so much of science is most likely false. I suggest you have a look at the work of Ben Goldacre, he's been a major voice in highlighting this issue. He's done a ted talk introducing the problem and later has written a book (Bad Pharma). He's only focussing on medical trials, but you always have to think: "This is happening in all areas of science".
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Interesting what gets downvoted here (the parent comment looks very "light gray" at the time I'm writing this). So in support and just for reference, some articles: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-false-claims/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-fal... http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t... http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re... http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/10/science-wrong http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/10/science-wrong

iQuercus 10y ago

Think about it this way: Suppose my theory is that a fair coin is not actually fair but always lands on heads. If I flip a coin one million times and only publish the ~500,000 results that show coin toss coming up as "heads," I could lead people to believe that a fair coin will always land on heads. That's how misleading this bias can be. But anyone can toss a fair coin, so I'd be found out pretty quick. But with more complicated and murky stuff like psychology this can be a huge problem, especially if people begin using this shaky work as foundation for things like: public policy, how to live their lives, how to do work, etc. After all they can't just toss a coin to check my work on the more complicated stuff.

tylerkahn 10y ago
I think what you're describing is just fraud. To take your fair coin example, publication bias is when the only studies that get published are the ones that show an unfairness in the coin – the rest of the studies that simply find 50% heads and 50% tails (aka a fair coin) don't get published because they're not interesting.
- Taek 10y ago
  Pre-registration solves this issue. If I announce the study before I have the results, we make sure that uninteresting outcomes are published.
  - fao_ 10y ago
    What if funding for a study gets withdrawn because it looks like it'll produce negative/unfavorable results?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      This should be publicly recorded too and maybe eventually we'll have a list of funding bodies that like to minmax profits by damaging research.
      - fao_ 10y ago
        This doesn't seem very feasible given the current level of privacy afforded to companies. I don't think there's a way to distinguish between studies that have lost funding because there are genuinely less funds to go around, and foo experiment just happened to be one of the ones that didn't make the cut, and studies that have had the funding pulled for harmful reasons (Like negative results). Mainly because it's devilishly easy to mask; you'd just reduce funding to research and redistribute it into something plausible like marketing. Of course this isn't feasible for lots of studies producing negative results. Of course, one way to counter that is to insist that the data is published regardless, but I'm sure that the data could be hidden with clever use of NDAs and court arguments along the lines of "We need to prohibit the distribution of company assets".
        TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Yeah, I guess. But something else came to my mind now: > Of course, one way to counter that is to insist that the data is published regardless, but I'm sure that the data could be hidden with clever use of NDAs and court arguments along the lines of "We need to prohibit the distribution of company assets". I find myself more and more treating complexity as a proxy for dishonesty. Companies that are trustworthy seem to have a relatively simple business model that they don't try to hide. The more convoluted it is, the more likely it is someone is scamming you. Wonder if that could be used as an effective metric - the more complex the reason someone weasels away from publishing the data, the more their "reputability" score goes down?
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  > I think what you're describing is just fraud. Fraud requires intent. Now, this extreme of bias would typically require said intent, sure. But let's say the experimenter has anterograde amnesia. They get an idea, flip a coin - oh hey, it's heads! They publish the interesting result. They get an idea, flip a coin - oh, it was tails, nevermind that theory. They get an idea... each time, they don't remember that they've already attempted the theory. No intent, no fraud, just bias. The good news is this is a pretty unlikely extreme in an individual. Anterograde amnesia is rare. The bad news is nobody can remember that someone else attempted a theory and came up with a negative result that they didn't bother to publish, and even individuals will have a hard time perfectly accounting for and preventing their own bias within a single study. The even worse news is that fraud exists as well.

conistonwater 10y ago

It's a rather old subject, and much richer than just publication bias, so there's plenty written about it. There is a good introduction on Andrew Gelman's blog, for example. http://andrewgelman.com/2016/03/05/29195/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/03/05/29195/ http://andrewgelman.com/category/zombies/ http://andrewgelman.com/category/zombies/ In particular, publication bias isn't quite as bad as the garden-of-forking-paths issue.

tdaltonc 10y ago

Yes it's a very big problem. One of my favorite meta analysis tools is used to detect and correct for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnel_plot

Houshalter 10y ago

Oh it's far worse than that. Iirc about a third of studies fail to replicate, and in psychology it might be higher. In fact we even have a control group for science. A fake field of research that spends it's time studying phenomena which can't possibly be real, the paranormal researchers. They produce tons of positive results anyway. See The Control Group is Out of Control: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-ou...

jldugger 10y ago
Nosek's finding was that half to two thirds fail to replicate: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716
pknight 10y ago
If your view is a priori that psi effects are impossible all you will see in the studies that 'it must be invalid and flawed or faked'. Yes, this makes people doubt scientific practices in general. You will always feel you are winning that argument, no matter what criteria those scientists meet. But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. Negative results do get published regularly. And more replications take place. It is quite hilarious really, because it makes people panic about what is wrong with the methods we apply across the board in science. Skeptics just raise the bar abritrarily and shift the goalposts as a means of sweeping things under the rug while calling it scientific rigour. We have also now gotten to the point that the fact that we commonly have failed replications (across all social science), it means the whole premise of a line of research must be completely flawed. But we should expect failed replications - for one, it's impossible to repeat a set of circumstances exactly. Many replications aren't true replications.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  > But psi researchers these days jump through far more hoops, run far more replications, spend far more time looking for weaknesses and alternative explanations, garner far more scrutiny and second guessing. To call that a 'fake field of research' when it is more rigorous is disingenuous. So what's a good study you can point me at? The nice thing about psi testing is that you can get a result sample every few seconds. It should be easy to turn even a moderately small effect into a five sigma result that's immune to publication bias.

jldugger 10y ago

The repercussions are pretty depressing for social sciences. Especially Psych, which relies on a lot of "30 undergraduates were recruited" to demonstrate effects. Particularly damaging is that this particular theory (thinking hard leads to drops in blood glucose levels) was widely promoted in the general public; I recall watching a TED talk about it, as well as a pop-sci book. There was an econtalk episode late last year with Brian Nosek about the Reproducability Project (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/brian_nosek_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/brian_nosek_on.html). They went the further step of analyzing the wider field to see how bad the biases are. Previous attempts to call out replication (priming theory) did not go well, leading to a lot of hostility. Nosek's process is a bit more friendly, by inviting the original authors's critique early, before data collection. I figure it's a bit harder to blast the auditors for considering a replication study without appearing as though you doubt the effect is real yourself. They still got a bit of pushback, but nowhere near as acrimonious.

dwaltrip 10y ago
It sounds like some of these researchers need their own ego depleted, for the sake of science. Critical, well-intentioned analyses of a study by other groups should be a welcome thing, as it will lead to more robust results. It seems like the incentives have gotten way out of whack.
- jldugger 10y ago
  Bear in mind it's not just ego, but livelihood. People's grant lines and tenure cases rely in part on contributing to the development of the field, and having the basis of your research retracted usually undermines your tenure review and puts a hamper on continued grant funding. So it's not super surprising that people are defensive, but I'm always amazed at how publicly aggressive things can get.

hannob 10y ago

It is an extremely big problem. In medicine all kinds of things were done to avoid publication bias (most notably trials registers). It still is a big problem, because the countermeasures aren't enforced. In most other areas people don't even try to counter it, which means it's probably much worse and we don't know how bad it is. It's a major reason why so much of science is most likely false. I suggest you have a look at the work of Ben Goldacre, he's been a major voice in highlighting this issue. He's done a ted talk introducing the problem and later has written a book (Bad Pharma). He's only focussing on medical trials, but you always have to think: "This is happening in all areas of science".

Noseshine 10y ago
Interesting what gets downvoted here (the parent comment looks very "light gray" at the time I'm writing this). So in support and just for reference, some articles: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... (Why Most Published Research Findings Are False) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-false-claims/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-epidemic-of-fal... http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t... http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re... http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/10/science-wrong http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/10/science-wrong