Previously Published Works

Guan, M; & Vandekerckhove, J. (2015). A Bayesian approach to mitigation of publication bias. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0868-6. UC Irvine: oa_harvester:919272. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2682p4tr

© 2015 Psychonomic Society, Inc. The reliability of published research findings in psychology has been a topic of rising concern. Publication bias, or treating positive findings differently from negative findings, is a contributing factor to this “crisis of confidence,” in that it likely inflates the number of false-positive effects in the literature. We demonstrate a Bayesian model averaging approach that takes into account the possibility of publication bias and allows for a better estimate of true underlying effect size. Accounting for the possibility of bias leads to a more conservative interpretation of published studies as well as meta-analyses. We provide mathematical details of the method and examples.