ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Science is not a signal detection problem.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 3 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
20 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Behavioral interventions for waste reduction: a systematic review of experimental studies.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Examining replicability in addictions research: How to assess and ways forward.Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors · 2022Pooled it
- Sleep deprivation and memory: Meta-analytic reviews of studies on sleep deprivation before and after learning.Psychological bulletin · 2021Pooled it
- On the Continuum of Foundational Validity: Lessons from Eyewitness Science for Latent Fingerprint Examination.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Did he or didn't he? Mixed evidence for the continued influence of retracted misinformation on person impressions.PloS one · 2025Article
- High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Can expected error costs justify testing a hypothesis at multiple alpha levels rather than searching for an elusive optimal alpha?PloS one · 2024Article
- Finding the right power balance: Better study design and collaboration can reduce dependence on statistical power.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- The tainted altruism effect: a successful pre-registered replication.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Article
- Acetonitrile Adducts of Tranexamic Acid as Sensitive Ions for Quantification at Residue Levels in Human Plasma by UHPLC-MS/MS.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- An exploratory, cross-cultural study on perception of putative cyclical changes in facial fertility cues.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Effects of age on goal-dependent modulation of episodic memory retrieval.Neurobiology of aging · 2021Article
- Patients with Ventromedial Prefrontal Lesions Show an Implicit Approach Bias to Angry Faces.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2021Article
- Science as collaborative knowledge generation.The British journal of social psychology · 2021Article
- Using Students' Concept-building Tendencies to Better Characterize Average-Performing Student Learning and Problem-Solving Approaches in General Chemistry.CBE life sciences education · 2020Article
- Signal detection continues to be part of science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Reply to Pek et al.: Science is not the signal detection problem it is ordinarily thought to be.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Consideration of Sample Size in Neuroscience Studies.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Developmental psychologists should adopt citizen science to improve generalization and reproducibility.Infant and child developmentArticle
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3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The perceived replication crisis and the reforms designed to address it are grounded in the notion that science is a binary signal detection problem. However, contrary to null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) logic, the magnitude of the underlying effect size for a given experiment is best conceptualized as a random draw from a continuous distribution, not as a random draw from a dichotomous distribution (null vs. alternative). Moreover, because continuously distributed effects selected using a
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Registered trials
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.