ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2023
Exploring the multiverse: the impact of researchers' analytic decisions on relationships between depression and inflammatory markers.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hunger as an uncontroversial predictor of poor adolescent mental health: evidence from a multiverse analysis of 410,213 adolescents across 79 countries.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Multiverse analysis of machine learning: classification between groups defined by suicidal ideation screening status using acoustic features in college students.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Complexity and risk factor research in mental disorders: better think twice.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Estimating the extent and sources of model uncertainty in political science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- On the pursuit of reproducibility: the importance of large sample sizes in psychoimmunology.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In recent years, a replication crisis in psychiatry has led to a growing focus on the impact of researchers' analytic decisions on the results from studies. Multiverse analyses involve examining results across a wide array of possible analytic decisions (e.g., log-transforming variables, number of covariates, or treatment of outliers) and identifying if study results are robust to researchers' analytic decisions. Studies have begun to use multiverse analysis for well-studied relationships that have some heterogeneity in results/conclusions across studies.We examine the well-studied relationship between peripheral inflammatory markers (PIMs; e.g., white blood cell count (WBC) and C-reactive protein (CRP)) and depression severity in the large NHANES dataset (n = 25,962). Specification curve analyses tested the impact of 9 common analytic decisions (comprising of 58,000+ possible combinations) on the association of PIMs and depression severity. Relationships of PIMs and total depression severity are robust to analytic decisions (based on tests of inference jointly examining effect sizes and p-values). However, moderate/large differences are noted in effect sizes based on analytic decisions and the majority of analyses do not result in significant findings, with the percentage of analyses with statistically significant results being 46.1% for WBC and 43.8% for CRP. For associations of PIMs with specific symptoms of depression, some associations (e.g., sleep, appetite) in males (but not females) were robust to analytic decisions. We discuss how multiverse analyses can be used to guide research and also the need for authors, reviewers, and editors to incorporate multiverse analyses to enhance replicability of research findings.
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