Statistics Done Wrong

Chapter 11. Hiding the Data

I’ve talked about the common mistakes made by scientists and how the best way to spot them is with a bit of outside scrutiny. Peer reviewers provide some of this scrutiny, but they don’t have time to extensively reanalyze data and read code for typos—they can check only that the methodology makes sense. Sometimes they spot obvious errors, but subtle problems are usually missed.¹

This is one reason why many journals and professional societies require researchers to make their data available to other scientists upon request. Full datasets are usually too large to print in the pages of a journal, and online publication of results is rare—full data is available online for less than 10% of papers published by top journals, ...