Psychological Statistics

Psych your mind has an interesting blog post on using p curves to detect dodgy stats in a a volume of published work (e.g., for a researcher or journal). The idea apparently comes from Uri Simonsohn (one of the authors of a recent paper on dodgy stats). The author (Michael W. Kraus) bravely plotted and published his own p curve - which looks reasonably 'healthy'. However, he makes an interesting point - which is that we don't know how useful these curves are in practice - which depends among other things on the variability inherent in the profile of p values.

I quickly threw together a simulation to address this in R. It is pretty limited (as I don't have much time right now), but potentially interesting.