Abstract
THERE are always a large number of persons engaged in searching for correlations between pairs of variables, most of which are, in fact, uncorrelated. From the way in which statistical tests of significance are constructed, we know that in the cases in which no correlation exists the search will be spuriously rewarded, on the average once in every hundred tests, by a result significant at the 1 per cent level. When interpreting a published result significant at this level, it is necessary to make allowance for the possible existence of ninety-nine other results which were not published because they were not significant.
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References
Tomaschek, R., Nature, 184, 177 (1959).
Fisher, R. A., “Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference” (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1956).
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BURR, E. Earthquakes and Uranus: Misuse of a Statistical Test of Significance. Nature 186, 336–337 (1960). https://doi.org/10.1038/186336b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/186336b0
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