Response to de Gendre and Salamanca's Comment on "Unpacking p-Hacking and Publication Bias"
We are grateful to Alexandra de Gendre and Nicolás Salamanca for their careful reproduction, robustness analyses, and extensions of our article, “Unpacking p-Hacking and Publication Bias.” Their comment exemplifies the type of scientific engagement that strengthens research and advances knowledge. We are particularly pleased that they were able not only to reproduce many of our findings, but also to probe their robustness, develop additional statistical tests, and propose new methodological approaches. Such efforts are especially valuable given the unusual data constraints surrounding our study. Because the underlying editorial data are highly confidential, substantial restrictions governed data access and sharing. Nevertheless, we worked to make the project as transparent and reproducible as possible, and we are delighted to see that these efforts enabled a thoughtful and productive independent assessment. We believe the revised comment makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on publication bias, p-hacking, peer review, and research transparency. We clarify a minor issue regarding sample sizes, highlight points of agreement between the comment and our original article, and discuss how this exchange illustrates the value of reproduction and critical scrutiny in empirical economics.
This paper responds to:
de Gendre, A., and N. Salamanca. 2026. Reproduction Report on “Unpacking p-Hacking and Publication Bias”. I4R Discussion Paper Series No. 305. Institute for Replication.