2021 Abstract from Jaisnav

Is Science Personalized?

Student Researcher: Jaisnav Rajesh (Waubonsie Valley High School)

Scientist Mentors: Ciaran Hughes, Ryan Plestid

Science is in the midst of a replication crisis, a crisis where researchers are unable to reproduce previous experiment results. A potential factor for the lack of reproducibility is the incorporation of a scientist’s biases, or personalization, in their work. This study examined the relationship between the significance of a scientist's research and the amount of personalization they incorporated in their papers to determine whether personal biases were more prevalent in papers of greater importance. Data from 44,200 APA psychology research papers were collected to determine personalization percentages (calculated by dividing the total number of personal pronouns by the total number of pronouns that correspond with the word “hypothesis”) and significance percentages (determined by dividing statistically significant p-values by the total number of p-values) for each individual paper. Contrary to the common assumption that science is an objective study, through data visualization, it appears there is a correlation between the significance of a paper and its personalization rate as over 63.12% of significant papers had a personalization rate greater than 50%.