Apr 27, 2017  |  Berkeley, CA

BIDS Working Group Presentation: Using “statcheck” to Detect Misreported Statistics in the Scientific Literature

The Reproducibility and Open Science Working Group at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) will host Michèle Nuijten on April 27 for a presentation about statcheck, and R package and web application that extracts statistics from articles and checks them for consistency.

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm

Description
Half of the psychology papers contain inconsistent statistical results in which the reported p-value does not match the reported test statistic and degrees of freedom. Most of these inconsistencies seem to be small and inconsequential, but in over 12.5% of the papers there are inconsistencies that might change the statistical conclusion. We developed the R package statcheck and the accompanying web app http://statcheck.io to automatically find these inconsistencies. In my talk I will discuss statcheck’s potential in preventing statistical errors through self-checks and peer review.

About the Speaker
Michèle Nuijten is a PhD candidate at Tilburg University where she is part of the Meta-Research Center. Her research focuses on meta-science, including a wide range of topics such as replication, publication bias, statistical errors, and questionable research practices. She is a co-developer of the R package and web application statcheck.