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Publication and other reporting biases in cognitive sciences: detection, prevalence, and prevention

Trends in cognitive sciences 18
Ioannidis, J.P.Munafo, M.R.Fusar-Poli, P. Nosek, B.A.David, S.P. Departments of Medicine and Health Research and Policy,
Stanford University School of Medicine,
Department of Statistics,
Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences,
Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS),
CA, USA

MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit,
UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies,
School of Experimental Psychology,
University of Bristol, UK

Department of Psychosis Studies,
Institute of Psychiatry,
King’s College London, UK

Center for Open Science,
Department of Psychology,
University of Virginia, USA

Department of Medicine,
Stanford University School of Medicine,
CA, USA
2014 Consciousness

Recent systematic reviews and empirical evaluations of the cognitive sciences literature suggest that publication and other reporting biases are prevalent across diverse domains of cognitive science. This review summarizes the various forms of publication and reporting biases and other questionable research practices, and overviews the available methods for probing into their existence. We discuss the available empirical evidence for the presence of such biases across the neuroimaging, animal, other pre-clinical, psychological, clinical trials, and genetics literature in the cognitive sciences. We also highlight emerging solutions (from study design to data analyses and reporting) to prevent bias and improve the fidelity in the field of cognitive science research.

The article was published in: Trends in cognitive sciences 18(5): 235-241.

Full article

This work was supported (in part) by the Fetzer Franklin Fund of the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust.