Disentangling p-Hacking and Publication Bias
Abstract
This study differentiates p-hacking from publication bias by examining biases resulting from selective reporting within studies versus selective publication of entire studies. Analyzing a dataset of 400 meta-studies, encompassing nearly 200,000 estimates from approximately 19,000 individual studies in economics and related social sciences, I observe a notably higher incidence of p-hacking as compared to selective publication. Employing various meta-regression methods, I find that selective reporting within studies is about 20% more prevalent than publication bias arising from selection among studies. This finding underscores the considerable influence of practices such as p-hacking and method-searching, suggesting that they contribute significantly to selection bias in the economic literature and could affect the perceived reliability of published findings.
Type
Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software.
Create your slides in Markdown - click the Slides button to check out the example.
Add the publication’s full text or supplementary notes here. You can use rich formatting such as including code, math, and images.
