The File Drawer Problem and Tolerance for Null Results.

Rosenthal, R. (1979). The File Drawer Problem and Tolerance for Null Results. Psychological Bulletin, 86(3), 638-641.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1979

DOI

10.1037/0033-2909.86.3.638

Link

https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.86.3.638

Cited from

communication_media_studies, literature_literary_theory, sociology_anthropology, statistics_experimental_design

Cited by

4 citations across 4 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Gatekeeping
  • The conditioning invariant is the load-bearing consequence: the published literature is the submission stream conditioned on passing the gate, so it differs from the unconditional stream on every dimension the criteria correlate with — which is the structural root of publication bias (positive results pass more readily than null results, so the published record over-represents positive findings).

    This sourceEstablishes publication bias: positive results pass the publication gate more readily than null results, so the published record (the admitted set) over-represents positive findings — the file-drawer problem.

• Silence as Signal
  • Publication and file-drawer bias. Significant findings are cheap to publish; null results are costly, so the meta-analyst reads the published record as the population of conducted studies and infers effects the full conducted set would not support.
• Structural Filtering
  • The pattern recurs in academic publishing (funder preferences, journal criteria, peer-review norms, tenure incentives, and field conventions filtering which research reaches print, yielding file-drawer effects and methodological homogeneity),
• Unreliable Narrator
  • Journalism and source evaluation — explicit models of source motive, proximity, and incentive, with triangulation across independent sources. Leadership and organisational reporting — status reports are systematically optimistic; skilled executives apply known transformations ("on track with a few yellow items" means red) rather than reading reports at face value. Scientific publication — the file-drawer effect, p-hacking, and conflict-of-interest filters make the literature a systematically distorted reporting function; meta-analysts apply explicit corrections.

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