P-hacking

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The practice of reanalysis of data until a desired result is obtained which is statistically significant. uncountable

    "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."

  2. 2
    Alternative letter-case form of p-hacking alt-of, uncountable
Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of p-hack form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms
data dredgingdata snooping

Example

More examples

"There are many common problematic research practices such as p-hacking."

Etymology

Blend of p-value + hacking, from "p" for probability. Coined by researchers Uri Simonsohn, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons, in 2014.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.