Some of the world's leading scientific journals are worryingly lax in ensuring that their papers contain adequate statistical details.
So say Italian researchers Tressoldi and colleagues in a provocative paper just out: High Impact = High Statistical Standards? Not Necessarily So.
They considered all articles published in 2011, that concerned any kind of psychological or medical study on human subjects. Four elite journals (Science, Nature, NEJM and The Lancet) were pitted against three much less 'impactful' publications.
It turned out that the good journals were often not very good at requiring authors to report their results in an informative way. Science and Nature were especially bad offenders: in the great majority of papers, there was no indication of the effect size or confidence intervals. This means that authors were allowed to state that some effect was occurring (it was statistically significant), but they didn't have say how large the effect ...
