Back in June, I warned that the ever-increasing number of clever methods for analyzing brain imaging data could be a double-edged sword:
Recently, psychologists Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn made waves when they published a provocative article calledFalse-Positive Psychology
- Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.
It explained how there are so many possible ways to gather and analyze the results of a simple psychology experiment that, even if there's nothing interesting really happening, it'll be possible to find some "significant" positive results purely by chance...
The problem's not just seen in psychology however, and I'm concerned that it's especially dangerous in modern neuroimaging research.
In a comment on that post, The Neurocritic pointed out that Michigan PhD student Joshua Carp had put forward the same argument in a conference presentation, several months previously.
Now Carp's published a paper on the topic: ...
