Monthly Archives: March 2014

Not invented here (NIH) is the philosophy of social, corporate, or institutional cultures that avoid using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins and costs. The reasons for not wanting to use the work of others are varied, but can include fear through lack of understanding, an unwillingness […]

FUTON (an acronym for full text on net) bias is a tendency of scholars to cite academic journals with open access—that is, journals that make their full text available on the Internet without charge—in their own writing as compared with toll access publications. Scholars can more easily discover and access articles that have their full […]

Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term “media bias” implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist […]

No abstract available bias, or NAA bias, refers to failures in academic research and academic publishing, whereby researchers will often ignore articles that could have a high degree of relevance, if they do not have an abstract available. When searching for a given phenomenon, often many spurious results are gleaned. This overload of information will […]

Publication bias is a bias with regard to what is likely to be published, among what is available to be published. Not all bias is inherently problematic – for instance, a bias against publishing lies is often a desirable bias – but one problematic and much-discussed bias is the tendency of researchers, editors, and pharmaceutical […]

In epidemiology, reporting bias is defined as “selective revealing or suppression of information” by subjects (for example about past medical history, smoking, sexual experiences). By extension, in empirical research in general, the term reporting bias may be used to refer to a tendency to under-report unexpected or undesirable experimental results, attributing the results to sampling […]

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. The survivors may literally be people, as in a medical study, or could be companies […]

The time-saving bias describes people’s tendency to incorrectly estimate the time that could be saved (or lost) when increasing (or decreasing) speed. In general, people underestimate the time that could be saved when increasing from a relatively low speed (e.g., 25 mph or 40 km/h) and overestimate the time that could be saved when increasing from a […]

The well travelled road effect is a cognitive bias in which travellers will estimate the time taken to traverse routes differently depending on their familiarity with the route. Frequently traveled routes are assessed as taking a shorter time than unfamiliar routes. This effect creates errors when estimating the most efficient route to an unfamiliar destination, when […]

Zero-risk bias is a tendency to prefer the complete elimination of a risk even when alternative options produce a greater reduction in risk (overall). This effect on decision making has been observed in surveys presenting hypothetical scenarios and certain real world policies (e.g. war against terrorism as opposed to reducing the risk of traffic accidents […]