Most striking was that the errors weren’t entirely random. Most of the errors tipped the results in favor of statistical significance. And around 13 percent of the papers contained an error that could potentially change the paper’s conclusions.
Were study authors purposely fudging their arithmetic? Not necessarily. These types of mistakes are easy to make — they’re “typos,” errors in transferring data from one program to another, she says. But because academic journals are more likely to publish significant results, these erroneous findings may be more likely to find themselves in the published literature.