Print Email Facebook Twitter Why selective publication of statistically significant results can be effective Title Why selective publication of statistically significant results can be effective Author De Winter, J.C.F. Happee, R. Faculty Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering Department Biomechanical Engineering Date 2013-06-20 Abstract Concerns exist within the medical and psychological sciences that many published research findings are not replicable. Guidelines accordingly recommend that the file drawer effect should be eliminated and that statistical significance should not be a criterion in the decision to submit and publish scientific results. By means of a simulation study, we show that selectively publishing effects that differ significantly from the cumulative meta-analytic effect evokes the Proteus phenomenon of poorly replicable and alternating findings. However, the simulation also shows that the selective publication approach yields a scientific record that is content rich as compared to publishing everything, in the sense that fewer publications are needed for obtaining an accurate meta-analytic estimation of the true effect. We conclude that, under the assumption of self-correcting science, the file drawer effect can be beneficial for the scientific collective. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3b46f593-9d00-47ba-983d-d3af5cc18e93 DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066463 Publisher Public Library of Science ISSN 1932-6203 Source Plos One, 8 (6), 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights (c) 2013 de Winter, Happee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Files PDF winterhappee.pdf 941.31 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:3b46f593-9d00-47ba-983d-d3af5cc18e93/datastream/OBJ/view