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I recently read a blog post talking about a journal article that compared the degree to which journal articles support their hypothesis. A comparison was done across disciplines, and if I recall, psychology had a higher level of acceptance than many other disciplines.

  • Does anyone know the reference to this article about variability in supporting hypotheses in journal articles across disciplines?
Jeromy Anglim
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2 Answers2

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Fanelli D (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10068. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010068

Keegan Keplinger
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Thanks @Xurtio for letting me know the article.

For sake of completeness, the following shows the graph of interest:

enter image description here

Name of discipline, abbreviation used throughout the paper, sample size and percentage of “positive” results (i.e. papers that support a tested hypothesis). Classification by discipline was based on the Essential Science Indicators database, the hard/soft, pure/applied and life/non-life categories were based on previous literature (see text for details). Error bars represent 95% logit-derived confidence interval.

Jeromy Anglim
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  • why not just edit the figure into @Xurtio's answer? – Artem Kaznatcheev May 30 '12 at 15:09
  • I didn't want to presume that Xurtio would be comfortable with me doing this. I often find it useful to do the above when I get a short answer, but I think that a reader would be interested in a little more information (e.g., on stackoverflow someone gives you a clue about the answer or says what function to apply; but then you go ahead and apply it to your code and show the worked example, etc.) – Jeromy Anglim May 30 '12 at 23:48