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oai:riuma.uma.es:10630/304392026-02-03T10:53:14Zcom_10630_2254col_10630_37953

Multiplicity Eludes Peer Review: The Case of COVID-19 Research. Gutiérrez-Hernández, Oliver García Fernández, Luis Ventura Geografía médica Epidemiología Invasiones biológicas COVID-19 CC BY Multiplicity arises when data analysis involves multiple simultaneous inferences, increasing the chance of spurious findings. It is a widespread problem frequently ignored by researchers. In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis of the Web of Science database for COVID-19 observational studies. We examined 100 top-cited COVID-19 peer-reviewed articles based on p-values, including up to 7100 simultaneous tests, with 50% including >34 tests, and 20% > 100 tests. We found that the larger the number of tests performed, the larger the number of significant results (r = 0.87, p < 10−6). The number of p-values in the abstracts was not related to the number of p-values in the papers. However, the highly significant results (p < 0.001) in the abstracts were strongly correlated (r = 0.61, p < 10−6) with the number of p < 0.001 significances in the papers. Furthermore, the abstracts included a higher proportion of significant results (0.91 vs. 0.50), and 80% reported only significant results. Only one reviewed paper addressed multiplicity-induced type I error inflation, pointing to potentially spurious results bypassing the peer-review process. We conclude the need to pay special attention to the increased chance of false discoveries in observational studies, including non-replicated striking discoveries with a potentially large social impact. We propose some easy-to-implement measures to assess and limit the effects of multiplicity. 2024-02-14T10:22:35Z 2024-02-14T10:22:35Z 2024 2021-09-03 journal article Gutiérrez-Hernández, O.; García, L.V. Multiplicity Eludes Peer Review: The Case of COVID-19 Research. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18, 9304. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18179304 https://hdl.handle.net/10630/30439 10.3390/ijerph18179304 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI