HARKing

Campbell’s Law Explains the Replication Crisis: Pre-Registration Badges Are History Repeating

Campbell’s Law explains the replication crisis. In brief, useful tools such as hypotheses, p-values, and multi-study designs came to be viewed as indicators of strong science, and thus goals in and of themselves. Consequently, their use became …

Does preregistration improve the credibility of research findings?

Preregistration entails researchers registering their planned research hypotheses, methods, and analyses in a time-stamped document before they undertake their data collection and analyses. This document is then made available with the published …

Questionable research practices in ecology and evolution

We surveyed 807 researchers (494 ecologists and 313 evolutionary biologists) about their use of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), including cherry picking statistically significant results, p hacking, and hypothesising after the results are …

Raiders of the lost HARK: a reproducible inference framework for big data science

Hypothesizing after the results are known (HARK) has been disparaged as data dredging, and safeguards including hypothesis preregistration and statistically rigorous oversight have been recommended. Despite potential drawbacks, HARK has deepened …

When Does HARKing Hurt? Identifying When Different Types of Undisclosed Post Hoc Hypothesizing Harm Scientific Progress

Hypothesizing after the results are known, or HARKing, occurs when researchers check their research results and then add or remove hypotheses on the basis of those results without acknowledging this process in their research report (Kerr, 1998). In …