A common saying in the media used to be “If it bleeds, it leads.” Nowadays, people talk about click-bait headlines. The more salacious and tantalizing the headline, the more likely people will click on that article, driving up profit for web-based advertising. The newsworthiness or the veracity of the story are inconsequential. Unfortunately, click-bait language is now entering academia.
Recently, a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called “Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates” by Anders Eklund, Thomas E. Nichols, and Hans Knutsson. The paper uses resting state fMRI data to estimate the familywise error rate of group statistical analyses when using a cluster threshold to control for multiple comparisons . When expecting 5% false positives, the study instead found much higher false positive rates,
This is an example of click-bait language entering academic papers. This is a foolish (and unprofessional) claim to make. To make a claim like this, they would need to comb through hundreds of fMRI papers, determining how many studies use cluster thresholds and large, voxelwise p-values. But the authors do not do this. Nevertheless, this paper caused a firestorm in the popular science journalism online, making headlines such as these: