HARKing
The term harking is from the English native shortcut . Long form "it means H ypothesizing A fter the R esults are K nown" to German : "putting up hypotheses after the announcement of results" (for example, an. Empirical study ). This made up word is often used in the social / human sciences .
example
A marksman has made it his business to hit a distant target exactly in the middle. Some observers have gathered around him. The marksman does not exactly announce his intention ("I hypothesize that I will succeed in hitting this target from this far distance"), but only signals to the audience that he wants to shoot.
His first shot misses and he hits the outer ring of the target. Then the shooter turns to the onlookers and claims: “This is exactly the point (the edge) that I wanted to hit. This shows how good I am as an archer. "
The sentence "Exactly this point [...]" is his hypothesis and his result of the arrow hitting the edge of the target. His hypothesis was therefore made after the results became known; the marksman thus operates HARKing.
Countermeasures
An increasing number of specialist journals are now adopting the registered report format in order to counter scientific misconduct such as HARKing and p-Hacking .
literature
- J. Bortz, N. Döring: Research methods and evaluation for human and social scientists . 4th edition. Springer, Heidelberg 2006.
Individual evidence
- ↑ psr.sagepub.com ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF)
- ↑ Promoting reproducibility with registered reports . In: Nature Human Behavior . tape 1 , no. January 1 , 2017, doi : 10.1038 / s41562-016-0034 .
