如今，在科學研究中，出現(xiàn)了比學術欺詐更令人擔憂發(fā)指的行為——P值黑客(P-hacking)。

P-hacking refers to the practice of manipulating scientific data so that the results appear to be statistically significant.
“P值黑客”是指操作科學數(shù)據(jù)，從而使結果看上去具有統(tǒng)計學意義的行為。

這個詞最早由賓夕法尼亞大學的西蒙松教授提出，一起來看看他是怎么說的：

Professor Uri Simonsohn of UPenn discussed what he refers to as "p-hacking." P-hacking is the idea that if researchers are engaging in questionable analysis practices, then they should have a disproportionate number of findings at or close to the p < .05 threshold for statistical significance, and that this can be relatively easy to detect.
賓夕法尼亞大學西蒙松教授談到他所指的P值黑客。P值黑客是指如果研究人員采用的分析方法可疑，那么他們應當有一個不成比例的P值數(shù)據(jù)結果等于或接近p<0.05這個統(tǒng)計學意義閥值，而這也相對很容易被發(fā)現(xiàn)。

雖然直譯為“P值黑客”，但從定義上看，該詞有“數(shù)據(jù)造假”的意思，這點可以從《大西洋月刊》上的文章《自我修正的科學之謎》(The Myth of Self-Correcting Science)中的解釋得到佐證：

Almost more alarming than the few individuals committing academic fraud are the high percentage of researchers who admitted to more common questionable research practices, like post-hoc theorizing and data-fishing (sometimes referred to as p-hacking), in a recent study led by Leslie John.
近期由萊斯利·約翰主導的研究指出，比少數(shù)人的學術欺詐行為更令人擔憂的是，有很高比例的研究人員承認他們的做法更普遍更不靠譜，如事后推理和數(shù)據(jù)造假(有時指P值黑客)。

（中國日報網(wǎng)英語點津 丁一）