Science about science

I have written on ‘p-hacking’, the phenomenon wherby people fudge the numbers in various ways in order to get the coveted p < 0.05. Our work suggests that p-hacking is widespread: there are suspicious bulges in the distribution of published p-values.

I have also written about blind methods, i.e. where the experimenter (and the subjects, if they are people) cannot identify the treatment groups, and thus consciously or unconsciously add bias. Our work found that blind methods are used less often than they should be, and that it really matters: non-blind studies tend to yield results that fall in the predicted direction.

Most recently, I have been working on the ‘gender gap’ in science. See the gender gap project for more inforation.