Specification Curve Analysis

Simonsohn, U., Simmons, J. P., & Nelson, L. D. (2020). Specification Curve Analysis. Nature Human Behaviour, 1208-1214.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

2020

Pages

1208-1214

DOI

10.1038/s41562-020-0912-z

DOI registrant

Springer Nature

Link

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0912-z

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

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

Mechanisms

• Alternative-Benchmark Sensitivity Grid
  • Its strength is that it neutralizes benchmark shopping by making it visible: a result that appears in only a corner of the grid can no longer be presented as if that corner were the whole map, and the reader sees exactly how conditional the claim is.

    This sourceDisplays results across the full set of reasonable specifications, revealing when a finding depends on only a narrow subset of analytic choices.

• Robustness Check
  • Its most disciplined form is a specification-curve analysis — computing the result across the whole reasonable space of analytic choices

    This sourcePresents specification-curve analysis as evaluating results across the whole reasonable space of analytic choices rather than selectively favoring a few specifications.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 2 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:bf8510fbc654 · see in the full table