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Unlucky Number 13? Manipulating Evidence Subject to Snooping

Uwe Hassler, Marc-Oliver Pohle

arXiv 4 Sep 2020 · Statistics — Applications · publishedInternational Statistical Review (2022) · 2 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2009.02198 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Questionable research practices like HARKing or p-hacking have generated considerable recent interest throughout and beyond the scientific community. We subsume such practices involving secret data snooping that influences subsequent statistical inference under the term MESSing (manipulating evidence subject to snooping) and discuss, illustrate and quantify the possibly dramatic effects of several forms of MESSing using an empirical and a simple theoretical example. The empirical example uses numbers from the most popular German lottery, which seem to suggest that 13 is an unlucky number.

Citation extraction

30
references
45
in-text mentions
30
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5,373
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_titled_section at “Appendix” · 95% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Simmons, J. P., L. D. Nelson, and U. Simonsohn (2011) False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant1.00053100%
2Kerr, N. L (1998) HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known0.73732100%
3Wallis, W. A (1942) Compounding probabilities from independent signficance tests0.64422100%
4Christensen, G., J. Freese, and E. Miguel (2019) Transparent and reproducible social science research: How to do open science0.64422100%
5Hand, D. J (1998) Data mining: Statistics and more?0.58531100%
6White, H (2000) A reality check for data snooping0.58531100%
7John, L. K., G. Loewenstein, and D. Prelec (2012) Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling0.51121100%
8Sterling, T. D., W. L. Rosenbaum, and J. J. Weinkam (1995) Publication decisions revisited: The effect of the outcome of statistical tests on the decision to publish and vice versa0.51121100%
9Wasserstein, R. L. and N. A. Lazar (2016) The ASA statement on p-values: Context, process, and purpose0.51121100%
10Chuard, P. J. C., M. Vrtílek, M. L. Head, and M. D. Jennions (2019) Evidence that nonsignificant results are sometimes preferred: Reverse $p$-hacking or selective reporting?0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 30 scored citations.