ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2024
Better Accuracy for Better Science . . . Through Random Conclusions.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- On Bayes factors for hypothesis tests.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Statistics in Service of Metascience: Measuring Replication Distance with Reproducibility Rate.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a baseline for interpreting effect-size estimates, in turn producing more stringent thresholds for hypothesis testing and for statistical-power calculations. An examination of recent meta-analyses in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine confirms that, even if all considered effects are real, results involving small effects are indeed indistinguishable from random conclusions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.