Standard analyses fail to show that US studies overestimate effect sizes in softer research

Fanelli and Ioannidis (1) have recently hypothesized that scientific biases are worsened by the relatively high publication pressures in the United States and by the use of “softer” methodologies in much of the behavioral sciences. The authors analyzed nearly 1,200 studies from 82 meta-analyses and found more extreme effect sizes in studies from the United States, and when using soft behavioral (BE) versus less-soft biobehavioral (BB) and nonbehavioral (NB) methods. Their results are based on nonstandard analyses, withas the dependent variable, where is the effect size (log of the odds ratio) of study i in meta-analysis j, and is the summary effect size of …