Questionable Research Practices or Questionable Reporting Practices (QRPs)
Definition: A range of activities that intentionally or unintentionally distort data in favour of a researcher’s own hypotheses - or omissions in reporting such practices - including; selective inclusion of data, hypothesising after the results are known (HARKing), and p-hacking. Popularized by John et al. (2012).
Related terms: Creative use of outliers, Fabrication, File-drawer, Garden of forking paths, HARKing, Nonpublication of data, *P*\-hacking, *P*\-value fishing, Partial publication of data, Post-hoc storytelling, Preregistration, Questionable Measurement Practices (QMP), Researcher degrees of freedom, Reverse *p*\-hacking, Salami slicing
References:
- Banks, G. C., Rogelberg, S. G., Woznyj, H. M., Landis, R. S., & Rupp, D. E. (2016). Editorial: Evidence on questionable research practices: The good, the bad, and the ugly. Journal of Business and Psychology, 31(3), 323–338. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-016-9456-7
- Fiedler, K., & Schwarz, N. (2016). Questionable research practices revisited. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(1), 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550615612150
- Hardwicke, T. E., Jameel, L., Jones, M., Walczak, E. J., & Weinberg, L. M. (2014). Only human: Scientists, systems, and suspect statistics. Opticon1826, 16, 25. https://doi.org/10.5334/OPT.CH
- John, L. K., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2012). Measuring the prevalence of questionable research practices with incentives for truth telling. Psychological Science, 23(5), 524–532. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611430953
- Neuroskeptic. (2012). The nine circles of scientific hell. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 643–644. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612459519
- Sijtsma, K. (2016). Playing with data—Or how to discourage questionable research practices and stimulate researchers to do things right. Psychometrika, 81(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11336-015-9446-0
Drafted and Reviewed by: Mahmoud Elsherif, Tamara Kalandadze, William Ngiam, Sam Parsons, Mariella Paul, Eike Mark Rinke, Timo Roettger, Flávio Azevedo