Questionable research practices in ecology and evolution

We surveyed 807 researchers (494 ecologists and 313 evolutionary biologists) about their use of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), including cherry picking statistically significant results, p hacking, and hypothesising after the results are known (HARKing). We also asked them to estimate the p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2018-07, Vol.13 (7), p.e0200303-e0200303
Main Authors: Fraser, Hannah, Parker, Tim, Nakagawa, Shinichi, Barnett, Ashley, Fidler, Fiona
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological Evolution
Biology and Life Sciences
Data collection
Ecological monitoring
Ecological research
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Evolution
Evolution (Biology)
Humans
Hypothesis testing
Medical ethics
Methods
Physical Sciences
Psychology
Publishing
Reproducibility
Reproducibility of Results
Research Design
Research Personnel - statistics & numerical data
Researchers
Science Policy
Scientific Misconduct - statistics & numerical data
Scientometrics
Social Sciences
Statistical analysis
Statistical significance
Statistics as Topic
Surveys
Surveys and Questionnaires
Trends
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Summary:We surveyed 807 researchers (494 ecologists and 313 evolutionary biologists) about their use of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), including cherry picking statistically significant results, p hacking, and hypothesising after the results are known (HARKing). We also asked them to estimate the proportion of their colleagues that use each of these QRPs. Several of the QRPs were prevalent within the ecology and evolution research community. Across the two groups, we found 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesised from the start (HARKing). Such practices have been directly implicated in the low rates of reproducible results uncovered by recent large scale replication studies in psychology and other disciplines. The rates of QRPs found in this study are comparable with the rates seen in psychology, indicating that the reproducibility problems discovered in psychology are also likely to be present in ecology and evolution.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0200303