Publication bias in academic journals is nothing new. A finding of no correlation between sporting events and either violent cri

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问题    Publication bias in academic journals is nothing new. A finding of no correlation between sporting events and either violent crime or property crime may be analytically top class, but you couldn’t be blamed, frankly, for not giving a damn. 【F1】But if journal editors are more interested in surprising or dramatic results, there is a danger that the final selection of published papers offers a distorted vision of reality.
   This should skew the distribution of published results, towards more "significant" findings. But a paper just published in a journal finds evidence of a different sort of bias, closer to the source. The results suggest that among the results that are only just significant, 10-20% have been made up.
   【F2】One explanation is that if a result shows up as significant at the 5% significance level (the industry standard) then researchers crack open the champagne and move on to making economics jokes. But if the result is ridiculously close to a positive result then perhaps the researchers will mess about a bit with their method... and celebrate their nice publisher-friendly result. 【F3】One of the paper’s authors explains that in economics it is difficult to conduct controlled experiments, which ultimately gives a lot of freedom to researchers to twist their methods. Sometimes researchers are twisting because they want to find the best way of estimating an effect, but sometimes it’s in the search for a significant effect The distinction might be hazy, even in their own minds.
   【F4】This is worrying for those trying to interpret and communicate the latest research, as it is impossible to tell if there has been foul play in any individual study. But more fundamentally it is worrying for the profession and policymakers making decisions based on economic evidence; being idle and running multiple, slightly different tests on the same data rapidly sucks meaning from the reported size and accuracy of the final results.
   Various solutions have been proposed. 【F5】One is to publish "pre-analysis plans", where researchers say how they will do their analysis before they actually do it. Another is to encourage more copy. To avoid the embarrassment of a non-result, researchers should be stricter with themselves when it comes to twisting their results. When sample sizes are small, this fix is difficult, as halving the sample power from tests. But in a world of big data, it could work. The bigger barrier might be getting career-conscious researchers to sign up.
【F1】

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答案然而,如果杂志编辑更热衷于出人意料或者具有戏剧性的结论,那可能会存在这样的危险——最终发表的论文呈现的是变形视角下的现实。

解析 ①本句为复合句。主句是there be句型,主句主语a danger后接that引导的同位语从句,对danger进行补充说明。②句首的But表明本句与前一句存在转折关系;if引导条件状语从句;be interesting in…意为“对……感兴趣”;distorted意为“扭曲的,歪曲的”。
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