Evidence of False Positives in Research Clearinghouses and Influential Journals: An Application of P-Curve to Policy Research

Abstract:This article presents a pre-analysis plan for analyzing the evidential value in a selection of policy research taken from scholarly journals and two research clearinghouses run by the federal government. The analysis will collect p-values from selected studies and estimate the evidential value that they represent using the newly introduced p-curve. This article outlines a precise data collection routine, a set of decision rules for including p-values in the analysis sample, and exact hypothesis tests to be used.