Is neuroscience facing up to statistical power?

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that the statistical power of many neuroscience studies is very low, so that the results are unlikely to be robustly reproducible. How are neuroscientists and the journals in which they publish responding to this problem? Here I review the sample size justifications provided for all 15 papers published in one recent issue of the leading journal Nature Neuroscience. Of these, only one claimed it was adequately powered. The others mostly appealed to the sample sizes used in earlier studies, despite a lack of evidence that these earlier studies were adequately powered. Thus, concerns regarding statistical power in neuroscience have mostly not yet been addressed.