The new normal? Redaction bias in biomedical science.

ABSTRACT: A concerning amount of biomedical research is not reproducible. Unreliable results impede empirical progress in medical science, ultimately putting patients at risk. Many proximal causes of this irreproducibility have been identified, a major one being inappropriate statistical methods and analytical choices by investigators. Within this, we formally quantify the impact of inappropriate redaction beyond a threshold value in biomedical science. This is effectively truncation of a dataset by removing extreme data points, and we elucidate its potential to accidentally or deliberately engineer a spurious result in significance testing. We demonstrate that the removal of a surprisingly small number of data points can be used to dramatically alter a result. It is unknown how often redaction bias

SUBMITTER: Grimes DR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8633797 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature