IN AN ideal world the data on which a scientific study is based should be, if not publicly available, then at least available to other researchers with a legitimate interest in asking. Sadly, this is not always the case. Though attitudes are changing, many scientists are still quite proprietorial about their data. They collected them, they reason, and thus they own them, and with them the right to analyse them without sharing them with rivals.
This attitude, though selfish, is understandable. But sometimes it can cover a darker secret. The statistics presented in a paper may have been manipulated to achieve a desired result. The author may, in other words, have cheated. If he releases the data, that cheating will be obvious. Better to keep them hidden.
That, though, will be harder in the future—at least for sets of data that consist of integer numbers in a known range, as do, for example, the answers to many questionnaires in psychology experiments. As they describe in a paper in PsyArXiv Preprints, Sean Wilner and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have come up with a way of reconstructing, given the mean, standard deviation and number of data points in a result (all three of which are usually stated as part of such a result), all the possible data sets which could have given...Continue reading
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