18h ago

"Do I have to report all data and how should I deal with outliers if there are too many?" —answer to Academia StackExchange

academia.stackexchange.com Do I have to report all data and how should I deal with outliers if there are too many?

Say I have a hypothesis and then did the experiment 10 times and collected 10 data points. Five of the data points agree well with my hypothesis, but the other five are outliers. I strongly believe...

I strongly believe in the validity of my hypothesis (which every experimentalist does I guess), but I can't find an explanation for the outliers, or the possible explanations are too many. Can I still publish with five good data points? How should I deal with the other five? I assume it's unethical to not report them, right?

3 comments

Jfc. Thank gods my anti-intellectual "all scientists are paid lackeys of our corrupt government" family members don't see this shit. Holy hell is this an embarrassing read.

It's disturbing that an academic, presumably a PhD candidate, has to ask this. Either they're scared of the PI, or the whole department is fucked.

As it so happens, forensics experts DO say things like that in court all of the time.