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.