Chapter 12. Questionable research practices

This chapter highlights the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices for some disciplines of Biology and Psychology, explains how they lead to non-reproducible research, and discusses solutions to begin to deal with them.

The preceding chapters introduced fundamental concepts to design experiments.  You also learned important statistical tests (e.g. randomisation test and t-tests) and how to interpret their results appropriately (e.g. interpret p-values along a continuum, and focus on effect sizes to understand the results’ practical importance).  Implementing these skills contribute to producing reproducible (reliable) research.

This Chapter shows that, even if we design an experiment well and analyse the data with an appropriate test (and interpret it correctly), the decisions we make throughout the research process can still dangerously compromise research reproducibility.  Such decisions are often called “Questionable Research Practices”.

This chapter highlights the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices for some disciplines of Biology and Psychology, explains how they lead to non-reproducible research, and discusses solutions to begin to deal with them.

We note that the topic of Questionable Research Practices is not typically covered in courses of “Experimental Design and / or Analysis”.  However, we expect that the videos in this chapter will convince you that it should be, and that reproducible (reliable) research demands that we follow wise practices.

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