This leads to yet another kind of publication bias: if a particular way of analyzing the data produces no result, and a different way produces something more intriguing, then of course the more interesting method is likely to be what is reported and then published. Scientists sometimes call this practice “HARKing”—HARK is an acronym for Hypothesizing After Results Known. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with gathering data, poking around to find the patterns, and then constructing a hypothesis. That’s all part of science. But you then have to get new data to test the hypothesis. Testing a
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