Industry cherry-picking is continuous with ordinary scientific publication bias

Evidence

Even if it is not explicit fraud, this sort of selective publication certainly seems fishy—as it should, since it is designed to mislead. But it is important to emphasize that selective publication is common in science even without industrial interference. Experiments that do not yield exciting results often go unpublished, or are relegated to minor journals where they are rarely read. Results that are ambiguous or unclear get left out of papers altogether. The upshot is that what gets published is never a perfect reflection of the experiments that were done. (This practice is sometimes referred to as “publication bias” or the “file drawer effect,” and it causes its own problems for scientific understanding.) This observation is not meant to excuse the motivated cherry-picking at work in the biased production strategy. Rather, it is to emphasize that, for better or worse, it is continuous with ordinary scientific practice. — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 359

Categorization

• QUESTION: If biased production is continuous with everyday file-drawer practice, how could we even distinguish propagandist behavior from ordinary self-correcting science without intent-based judgments?
• XREF: connects to: Small studies more often yield spurious results a propagandist can exploit — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 365; Low-powered studies disproportionately feed industry propaganda — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age: How False…, 386; Trim-and-fill and funnel graph methods tend to overestimate publication bias. — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 48 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Trim-and-fill and funnel graph methods tend to overestimate publication bias. #complicates (0.85) — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 48
• Industry-funded media research cherry-picks designs that guarantee null findings. #exemplifies (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 904
• Industry-stacked committees produced deliberately obfuscatory scientific reports #exemplifies (0.82)
• Publication bias inflates the apparent effectiveness of prejudice-reduction programs #corroborates (0.80) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2670
• Industry can distort science simply by funding the researchers who suit it #expands (0.78) — Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 400
• Publication bias explains apparent effects in alternative medicine research. #corroborates (0.75) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 770
• Publication bias can be detected through sample-size and effect-size correlations. #corroborates (0.75) — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 47
• Comparing published and unpublished studies tests whether reporting bias inflates effects. #corroborates (0.72) — Thomas F. Pettigrew, Linda R. Tropp, A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup…, 109