Misreported Research in Psychology: A Text and Data Mining Case Study
A student researcher from UC Berkeley analyzes 6 peer-reviewed psychology journals to quantify concerns raised in the replication crisis
Text and data mining (TDM) has countless applications in research, teaching and learning. Yuyang Zhong, an undergraduate researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, recently used the technology to analyze psychological research from six prominent, peer-reviewed journals – and examine concerns related to misreported research.
With the help of TDM Studio, ProQuest’s end-to-end TDM solution, Zhong was able to quantify a small but significant amount of misreporting research statistics.
“These range from calculation errors to rounding errors to blatant falsification of results. These results confirm the seriousness of the collective concerns of replication and reproducibility, which remains a crisis facing psychology and many other scientific disciplines,” he said. “This project would not have been possible without the power of [TDM].”
TDM Studio is used by researchers across disciplines with or without the knowledge of coding. It provides access to sought-after content, including current and historical newspapers, primary sources, scholarly journals, and dissertations and theses.