Sophie van der Sluis elucidates findings published in Nature Neuroscience (Aarts et al., 2014) in the Scientific American.
Neuroscientists need a statistics refresher.
That is the message of a new analysis in Nature Neuroscience that shows that more than half of 314 articles on neuroscience in elite journals during an 18-month period failed to take adequate measures to ensure that statistically significant study results were not, in fact, erroneous. Consequently, at least some of the results from papers in journals like Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience and Cell were likely to be false positives, even after going through the arduous peer-review gauntlet.