Exploring Publication Bias

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Who You’ll Hear

Kati Kleber, MSN RN – Nurse educator, former cardiac med-surg/stepdown and neurocritical care nurse, author, and speaker.

Julie Birky, MSW MA LCSW – Clinical social worker, teacher of sociology, practicing therapy clinician

What You’ll Learn

• Evidence based practice
• What influnces research?
• Publication bias

Exploring Publication Bias Show Notes

• Nursing school focuses on little research
  • Wasn’t until Master that you really learn what to look for and what is good research
  • Assumed all evidence based practice is done the same
    • Every hosptial does it differently
    • All research is not the same
• What infulences research?
  • Has to be accepted to be published
  • First author came up to study the subject
  • Impact factor
• Publication bias
  • Reasearch is done based on needs
  • What subject can get me published?
  • Journals more likely to accept research where findings match the hypothisis
    • Positive results
    • Journals are filled with more positve results
  • This lays groundwork for bias
    • See more of something we think that is representaive of the population
  • We have to look for the big picture in research
  • Publication bias results from the selective publication of studies based on the direction and magnitude of their results-studies without statistical significance (negative studies) are less likely to be published.
  • We need those negative results also

• The file drawer problem
  • suggests that results not supporting the hypotheses of researchers often go no further than the researchers’ file drawers, leading to a bias in published research
• P-hacking
  • Doing the same tests over and over until you eventually hit the desired results by chance.
  • P-hacking is typically done through manipulation of “researcher degrees of freedom,” or the decisions made by the investigator.
  • There is no indication that p-hacking was used
• HARKing
  • HARKing is defined as presenting a post hoc hypothesis in one’s research report as if it were, in fact, an a pre hypotheses.
• Citation Bias
  • The more times your article has been cited, the more value we place on it
  • We cite positive results more often
  • Feeding on itself problem
• How are we combating publication bias?
  • Publication bias may be reduced by journals publishing high-quality studies regardless of novelty or unexciting results, and by publishing protocols or full-study data sets
  • There are grassroots orginizations publishing high quality studies regarless of results

More Resources for Exploring Publication Bias

• The Extent and Consequences of P-Hacking in Science 
• Stat Experts Plead: Just Say No to P-Hacking
• HARKing, Cherry-Picking, P-Hacking, Fishing Expeditions, and Data Dredging and Mining as Questionable Research Practices
• Unintended Consequences: The Perils of Publication and Citation Bias
• The radio station Julie is featured on with her “mental health minute”