Pressure to publish and the prevalence of positive results
This PLoS One study attempted to look at how pressure to publish might influence the prevalence of positive results. The author, Daniele Fanelli, made an odd choice by using ‘papers per capita by state’ as the measure of pressure to publish. The state seems way too macro a level to look at. I would expect pressure to vary strongly between schools and between departments within schools. There’s no reasoning for this given in the paper - I suspect that it was just simpler to use this measure, already provided by the NSF, then to come up with a method for looking at individual institutions.