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Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature

Denes Szucs, John PA Ioannidis
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/071530
Denes Szucs
1Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK
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  • For correspondence: ds377@cam.ac.uk
John PA Ioannidis
2Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) and Department of Medicine, Department of Health Research and Policy, and Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, USA
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Abstract

We have empirically assessed the distribution of published effect sizes and estimated power by extracting more than 100,000 statistical records from about 10,000 cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published during the past 5 years. The reported median effect size was d=0.93 (inter-quartile range: 0.64-1.46) for nominally statistically significant results and d=0.24 (0.11-0.42) for non-significant results. Median power to detect small, medium and large effects was 0.12, 0.44 and 0.73, reflecting no improvement through the past half-century. Power was lowest for cognitive neuroscience journals. 14% of papers reported some statistically significant results, although the respective F statistic and degrees of freedom proved that these were non-significant; p value errors positively correlated with journal impact factors. False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature. In light of our findings the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 25, 2016.
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Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature
Denes Szucs, John PA Ioannidis
bioRxiv 071530; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/071530
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Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature
Denes Szucs, John PA Ioannidis
bioRxiv 071530; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/071530

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