ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Power-up: A Reanalysis of 'Power Failure' in Neuroscience Using Mixture Modeling.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Frontostriatal circuitry as a target for fMRI-based neurofeedback interventions: A systematic review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Disrupted Dorsal Mid-Insula Activation During Interoception Across Psychiatric Disorders.The American journal of psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Non-invasive neuromodulation for migraine and cluster headache: a systematic review of clinical trials.Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry · 2019Pooled it
- Effect size and statistical power in the rodent fear conditioning literature - A systematic review.PloS one · 2018Pooled it
- Statistical Power in Musculoskeletal Research: A Meta-Review of 266 Randomised Controlled Trials.Sports medicine - open · 2025Review
- Decoding Prejudice: Understanding Patterns of Adolescent Mental Health Stigma.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Sample size estimation for task-related functional MRI studies using Bayesian updating.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Examining Blunted Initial Response to Reward and Recent Suicidal Ideation in Children and Adolescents Using Event-Related Potentials: Failure to Conceptually Replicate Across Two Independent Samples.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Influence of Strenuous Physical Activity and Cardiorespiratory Fitness on Age-Related Differences in Brain Activations During Varieties of Cognitive Control.Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Power and optimal study design in iPSC-based brain disease modelling.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Article
- Bayesian stroke modeling details sex biases in the white matter substrates of aphasia.Communications biology · 2023Article
- A new acquisition protocol for conducting studies with children: The science camp research experience.PloS one · 2023Article
- Associations between sleep health and grey matter volume in the UK Biobank cohort (Brain communications · 2023Article
- Analysis of new treatments proposed for malignant pleural mesothelioma raises concerns about the conduction of clinical trials in oncology.Journal of translational medicine · 2022Article
- Better Inference in Neuroscience: Test Less, Estimate More.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Associations Between Sleep Health and Amygdala Reactivity to Negative Facial Expressions in the UK Biobank Cohort.Biological psychiatry · 2022Article
- Hostility bias or sadness bias in excluded individuals: does anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of right VLPFC vs. left DLPFC have a mitigating effect?Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Statistical power for cluster analysis.BMC bioinformatics · 2022Article
- Proxyeconomics, a theory and model of proxy-based competition and cultural evolution.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
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4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recently, evidence for endemically low statistical power has cast neuroscience findings into doubt. If low statistical power plagues neuroscience, then this reduces confidence in the reported effects. However, if statistical power is not uniformly low, then such blanket mistrust might not be warranted. Here, we provide a different perspective on this issue, analyzing data from an influential study reporting a median power of 21% across 49 meta-analyses (Button et al., 2013). We demonstrate, using Gaussian mixture modeling, that the sample of 730 studies included in that analysis comprises several subcomponents so the use of a single summary statistic is insufficient to characterize the nature of the distribution. We find that statistical power is extremely low for studies included in meta-analyses that reported a null result and that it varies substantially across subfields of neuroscience, with particularly low power in candidate gene association studies. Therefore, whereas power in neuroscience remains a critical issue, the notion that studies are systematically underpowered is not the full story: low power is far from a universal problem.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.