Affiliation:
1. Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak has led to an exponential increase of publications and preprints about the virus, its causes, consequences, and possible cures. COVID-19 research has been conducted under high time pressure and has been subject to financial and societal interests. Doing research under such pressure may influence the scrutiny with which researchers perform and write up their studies. Either researchers become more diligent, because of the high-stakes nature of the research, or the time pressure may lead to cutting corners and lower quality output. In this study, we conducted a natural experiment to compare the prevalence of incorrectly reported statistics in a stratified random sample of COVID-19 preprints and a matched sample of non-COVID-19 preprints. Our results show that the overall prevalence of incorrectly reported statistics is 9–10%, but frequentist as well as Bayesian hypothesis tests show no difference in the number of statistical inconsistencies between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 preprints. In conclusion, the literature suggests that COVID-19 research may on average have more methodological problems than non-COVID-19 research, but our results show that there is no difference in the statistical reporting quality.
Funder
Herbert Simon Research Institute of Tilburg University
European Research Council
Reference40 articles.
1. Scientists are drowning in COVID-19 papers: can new tools keep them afloat?;Brainard J;Science,2020
2. Will the pandemic permanently alter scientific publishing?
3. Horbach SPJM. 2020 Pandemic publishing: medical journals drastically speed up their publication process for COVID-19 . BioRxiv . (doi:10.1101/2020.04.18.045963)
4. Marcus A Oransky I. 2020 The science of this pandemic is moving at dangerous speeds. Wired . See https://www.wired.com/story/the-science-of-this-pandemic-is-moving-at-dangerous-speeds/ (accessed 1 February 2021).
5. COVID-19 research: pandemic versus “paperdemic”, integrity, values and risks of the “speed science”