University of Helsinki
The NIH (USA, National Institutes of Health) has opened a new web site on the subject, which although focused on Biomedical research, provides a good account of current trends and problems, how to overcome them and guidelines that could be easily adapted for the rest of the Biosciences including Plant Science.
Some frequent ways of unwillingly misrepresenting experimental results
Many students and some researchers are ignorant of the fact that any of the following practices are statistically invalid and could be considered to be ‘research-results manipulation’ (=cheating):
- Repeating an experiment until the p-value becomes significant.
- Reporting only a ‘typical’ (=nice-looking) replication of the experiment, and presenting statistics (tests of significance and/or parameter estimates such as means and standard errors) based only on this subset of the data.
- Presenting a subset of the data chosen using a subjective criterion.
- Not reporting that outliers have been removed from the data presented or used in analyses.