Follow-up to Bibliometrics of Cluster Inference from the NISOx blog.

Given the widespread misinterpretation of our paper, Eklund et al., Cluster Failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates, we filed an errata with the PNAS Editoral office:

Errata for Eklund et al., Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates.
Eklund, Anders; Nichols, Thomas E; Knutsson, Hans

Two sentences were poorly worded and could easily be misunderstood as overstating our results.

The last sentence of the Significance statement should read: “These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.”

The first sentence after the heading “The future of fMRI” should have read: “Due to lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices it is unlikely that problematic analyses can be redone.”

These replace the two sentences that mistakenly implied that our work affected all 40,000 publications (see Bibliometrics of Cluster Inference for an guestimate of how much of the literature is potentially affected).

After initially declining the the errata, on the grounds that it was correcting interpretation and not fact, PNAS have agreed to publish it:

• Correction for Eklund et al., Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates, PNAS 2016 0:1612033113v1-201612033; doi:10.1073/pnas.1612033113.

The online PDF of the orignal article now reflects these corrections.

Update.

Revised to reflect PNAS acceptance of errata. 19 July 2016.
Revised to reference PNAS correction. 16 August 2016.