From: Nature
‘Spell-Checker for Statistics’ Reduces Errors in the Psychology Literature
A free-to-use tool designed to detect statistical errors is significantly reducing the number of mistakes creeping into papers, suggests a study published this January1.
First described in a 2015 publication2, statcheck is an online tool that can identify errors in the P values — a controversial but popular statistical measure — reported in scientific papers. The tool, developed by Michèle Nuijten, a methodologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has been applied to tens of thousands of psychology studies during peer review and by authors themselves, and according to a 2017 study, it is right more than 95% of the time3.
Several journals have now implemented statcheck — which Nuijten calls a spell-checker for statistics — in their peer-review processes. In the new study, which was published on the PsyArXiv preprint server and has not yet been peer-reviewed1, Nuijten set out to quantify the tool’s impact by comparing the rate of errors in P values in two psychology journals before and after they implemented statcheck, and in two journals that have never used the tool.
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