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A Research Study On The Expression, Publish Or Perish, Is The Norm Within All Academic Disciplines

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The expression “publish or perish” is the norm within all academic disciplines and researchers will not get tenured if they do not publish academic work (Miller, Taylor & Bedeian, 2011; Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn, 2012; De Rond & Miller, 2005). The same is true for professors applying for grants or graduate students seeking scholarships, where having more publications will set someone apart from other candidates. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as good researchers are expected to produce good research, however standards for most scholarly journals to publish an academic article mostly rely on significance (Sterling, 2012). Studies not finding significant results do not get published and are often considered failures (Cumming, 2008; …show more content…

The following will discuss the replication crisis from an undergraduate student’s perspective and how it affected my undergraduate journey specifically. Introductory statistics are part of the problem Initial statistical courses are exciting, as students are taught the foundations of conducting research by learning about inferential statistics. However, important topics such as power, confidence intervals and effect sizes are briefly discussed and quickly forgotten due to the large amount of new information taught in those courses. Over time, students simply learn to rely on p-values, where p < .05, the null hypothesis is rejected and p > .05, the null hypothesis is retained. Statistics are overwhelming and a lot of practice and reading are required to fully understand how it really works. I am a fourth year student and consider myself as having a higher than average knowledge of statistics compared to most fellow students in my year, but I have a lot to learn and am aware that I still do not understand most of it. That is one reason why NHST is surviving, as it is convenient and a strong statistical knowledge is not needed to apply it in research. The point is that appropriate ways to interpret statistics and ethical research practices should be taught as early as possible to avoid the use of common unethical research practices. Next, students learn

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