
Another installment of Ask Retraction Watch:
Recently I heard a graduate student was told by their advisor, ‘Don’t do a t-test, it’s not publishable.’ This seems ridiculous to me as the t-test is a robust test to aid in answering a hypothesis. So my question is: is a t-test no longer publishable? And if so, is this true for higher tiered journals, or all peer-reviewed journals?
I would very much appreciate hearing the opinions of your readers on this issue – do they feel they need to run more ‘elaborate’ statistics (e.g., multivariate, modeling, etc.) in order for their research to be publishable? And if so, do researchers knowingly violate the assumptions of these more elaborate statistical tests so they can be ‘publishable’?
Please take our poll, and comment below.