60th Anniversary Essay: How Journals Could Improve Research Practices in Social Science

This essay proposes ways to improve editorial evaluations of manuscripts and to make published research more reliable and trustworthy. It points to troublesome properties of current editorial practices and suggests that editorial evaluations could become more reliable by making more allowance for reviewers' human limitations. The essay also identifies some troublesome properties of prevalent methodology, such as statistical significance tests, HARKing, and p-Hacking, and proposes editorial policies to mitigate these detrimental behaviors.