The eleventh OSCR ReproducibiliTea journal club will take place on October 28th at 15:00. The discussant will be Naoyuki Sunami, PhD candidate at the University of Delaware. Nami will talk about the following paper1:

Gelman, A., & Loken, E. (2013). The garden of forking paths: Why multiple comparisons can be a problem, even when there is no “fishing expedition” or “p-hacking” and the research hypothesis was posited ahead of time. Columbia Statistics. https://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/p_hacking.pdf

When we think about p-hacking, we often picture researchers performing tests repeatedly and report the ones that “worked” (p < .05). However, researchers can unintentionally increase researcher degrees of freedom by other data-dependent decisions. This paper warns us of the garden of forking paths in data exclusion, coding, and analysis, and how these decisions prevent us from interpreting p-values at their face value.

Attendees will be encouraged to talk about their own gardens of forking paths, their implications to reproducibility, and how we can move forward.

An invitation via Outlook calendar has been sent to researchers in the OSCR mailing list2. This email includes a link to join the meeting remotely using Zoom. Click on the link, insert the password provided in the invitation mail, and you will join the call.

During the Zoom meeting, please follow these guidelines:

  • wear headphones
  • mute your microphone
  • video is optional (in case of connection issues, you may be asked to turn it off)
  • pay attention to the moderator (which will be Antonio)
  • if you have questions
    • click on the Raise Hand button and the moderator will unmute you; or
    • write down your question in the chat and the moderator will read it
  • avoid talking over each other and make sure that everyone can have their opportunity to speak
  • arrive a few minutes before the beginning of the call, to familiarize with the online environment and solve possible technical issues

Please remember that attendees of every OSCR event (in-person or online) are required to follow our Code of Conduct.

Take care,

Nami Sunami and Antonio Schettino

  1. The slide deck will be available on our OSF repository.↩︎

  2. If you are not part of the OSCR mailing lists but would like to join, please contact Antonio.↩︎