1 Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University.
2 Department of Sociology, Utrecht University.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Apr;30(4):576-586. doi: 10.1177/0956797619830326. Epub 2019 Feb 21.
We examined the percentage of p values (.05 < p ≤ .10) reported as marginally significant in 44,200 articles, across nine psychology disciplines, published in 70 journals belonging to the American Psychological Association between 1985 and 2016. Using regular expressions, we extracted 42,504 p values between .05 and .10. Almost 40% of p values in this range were reported as marginally significant, although there were considerable differences between disciplines. The practice is most common in organizational psychology (45.4%) and least common in clinical psychology (30.1%). Contrary to what was reported by previous researchers, our results showed no evidence of an increasing trend in any discipline; in all disciplines, the percentage of p values reported as marginally significant was decreasing or constant over time. We recommend against reporting these results as marginally significant because of the low evidential value of p values between .05 and .10.
我们检查了在 1985 年至 2016 年间，美国心理协会所属的 70 种期刊上发表的 9 个心理学领域的 44200 篇文章中，将 p 值（0.05<p≤0.10）报告为边缘显著的百分比。我们使用正则表达式提取了 0.05 到 0.10 之间的 42504 个 p 值。尽管不同学科之间存在很大差异，但该范围内的近 40%的 p 值被报告为边缘显著。这种做法在组织心理学中最为常见（45.4%），在临床心理学中则最为少见（30.1%）。与之前研究人员的报告相反，我们的结果表明，在任何学科中都没有证据表明呈上升趋势；在所有学科中，随着时间的推移，报告为边缘显著的 p 值百分比要么减少，要么保持不变。我们建议不要将这些结果报告为边缘显著，因为 p 值在 0.05 到 0.10 之间的证据价值较低。
