Michèle will give a talk at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, titled: Using “statcheck” to detect misreported statistics in the scientific literature, and other ways to improve science.

Half of the psychology papers contain inconsistent statistical results in which the reported p-value does not match the reported test statistic and degrees of freedom. Most of these inconsistencies seem to be small and inconsequential, but in over 12.5% of the papers there are inconsistencies that might change the statistical conclusion. We developed the R package “statcheck” and the accompanying web app http://statcheck.io to automatically find these inconsistencies. In my talk I will discuss statcheck’s potential in preventing statistical errors through self-checks and peer review. I will also discuss the recent debate about the use of statcheck in post-publication peer review.

Statistical reporting errors are only one of the problems that psychology (and other scientific fields) is currently facing. At the Meta-Research Center at Tilburg University (http://metaresearch.nl) we are working on many other meta-scientific topics, such as publication bias, replications, false positives and negatives in the literature, integrity, open access, and more. To end my talk, I will give a short overview of our work.