p-hacking
p-hacking noun: the practice of reanalysis of data until a desired result is obtained which is statistically significant. Also the present participle and gerund of p-hack.
Noun (1)
p-hacking (uncountable)
- The practice of reanalysis of data until a desired result is obtained which is statistically significant.
- Cherry-picking promising findings, also known by such terms as data dredging, significance chasing, significance questing, selective inference, and “p-hacking,” leads to a spurious excess of statistically significant results in the published literature and should be vigorously avoided.[2016, Ronald L. Wasserstein, Nicole A. Lazar, “The ASA Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose”, in The American Statistician, volume 70, number 2, →DOI
- Synonyms:
- data dredging, data snooping
Noun (2) capitalized: P-hacking
P-hacking (uncountable)
- Alternative letter-case form of p-hacking
Also used as
p-hacking is also the present participle and gerund of p-hack.
Synonyms of p-hacking
Forms of p-hacking
| alternative form | P-hacking |
|---|
Origin of p-hacking
Blend of p-value + hacking, from "p" for probability. Coined by researchers Uri Simonsohn, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons, in 2014.
Questions about p-hacking
- What does p-hacking mean?
- P-hacking means the practice of reanalysis of data until a desired result is obtained which is statistically significant.
- What part of speech is p-hacking?
- P-hacking is a noun.
Words near p-hacking in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: p-hacking (page history and authors); P-hacking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “p-hacking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/p-hacking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.