Pueblo Serna

tl;dr: Using RMarkdown with knitr is a nice way to decrease statistical reporting errors. How often are there statistical reporting errors in published research? Using a new automated method for scraping APA-formatted stats out of PDFs,  Nuijten et al. (2015)  found that over 10% of p-values were inconsistent with the reported details of the statistical test, and 1.6% were what they called "grossly" inconsistent, e.g. difference between the p-value and the test statistic meant that one implied statistical significance and the other did not (another summary here ). Here are two key figures, first for proportion inconsistent by article and then for proportion of articles with an inconsistency: These graphs are upsetting news. Around half of articles had at least one error by this analysis, which is not what you want from your scientific literature.* Daniel Lakens has a  nice post  suggesting that three errors account for many of the problems: incorrect use of < ins...

(Note: this post is joint with Brent Roberts and Michael Kraus , and is cross-posted on their blogs - MK and BR ). MK: Twitter recently rolled out a polling feature that allows its users to ask and answer questions of each other. The poll feature allows polling with two possible response options (e.g., Is it Fall? Yes/No). Armed with snark and some basic training in psychometrics and scale construction, I thought it would be fun to pose the following as my first poll : Said training suggests that, all things being equal, some people are more �Yes� or more �No� than others, so having response options that include more variety will capture more of the real variance in participant responses. To put that into an example, if I ask you if you agree with the statement: � I have high self-esteem. � A yes/no two-item response won�t capture all the true variance in people�s responses that might be otherwise captured by six items ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. MF/BR, is that...