The DOI matches its Crossref record; 18 of the 18 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
“The Stippling Shows Statistically Significant Grid Points”: How Research Results are Routinely Overstated and Overinterpreted, and What to Do about It
Abstract
Special care must be exercised in the interpretation of multiple statistical hypothesis tests—for example, when each of many tests corresponds to a different location. Correctly interpreting results of multiple simultaneous tests requires a higher standard of evidence than is the case when evaluating results of a single test, and this has been known in the atmospheric sciences literature for more than a century. Even so, the issue continues to be widely ignored, leading routinely to overstatement and overinterpretation of scientific results, to the detriment of the discipline. This paper reviews the history of the multiple-testing issue within the atmospheric sciences literature and illustrates a statistically principled and computationally easy approach to dealing with it—namely, control of the false discovery rate.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Controlling the False Discovery Rate: A Practical and Powerful Approach to Multiple Testing
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995) · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology · doi:10.1111/j.2517-6161.1995.tb02031.x · Cited by 109,482
Statistical significance for genomewide studies
Storey, J. D., & Tibshirani, R. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1530509100 · Cited by 9,692
Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences
Ramsey, P. H. (1996) · Technometrics · doi:10.1080/00401706.1996.10484553 · Cited by 7,601
Statistical Analysis in Climate Research
Lund, R. B., von Storch, H., & Zwiers, F. W. (2000) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.2307/2669798 · Cited by 2,741
Statistical Analysis in Climate Research
Storch, H. V., & Zwiers, F. W. (1999) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511612336 · Cited by 2,717
Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
(2014) · Climate Change 2013 – The Physical Science Basis · doi:10.1017/cbo9781107415324.008 · Cited by 1,430
Statistical Field Significance and its Determination by Monte Carlo Techniques
Livezey, R. E., & Chen, W. Y. (1983) · Monthly Weather Review · doi:10.1175/1520-0493(1983)111<0046:sfsaid>2.0.co;2 · Cited by 1,153
Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences
(2011) · International Geophysics · doi:10.1016/c2010-0-65519-2 · Cited by 1,063
Statistical methods in the atmospheric sciences
Wilks, D. S. (2006) · Cited by 1,046
Self-citationOn “Field Significance” and the False Discovery Rate
Wilks, D. S. (2006) · Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology · doi:10.1175/jam2404.1 · Cited by 531
Self-citation
Cited by
Evidence of anthropogenic impacts on global drought frequency, duration, and intensity
Chiang, F., Mazdiyasni, O., & AghaKouchak, A. (2021) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22314-w · Cited by 689
Scheuerer, M., Switanek, M. B., Worsnop, R. P., & Hamill, T. M. (2020) · Monthly Weather Review · doi:10.1175/mwr-d-20-0096.1 · Cited by 82
Increased Occurrence of Record‐Wet and Record‐Dry Months Reflect Changes in Mean Rainfall
Lehmann, J., Mempel, F., & Coumou, D. (2018) · Geophysical Research Letters · doi:10.1029/2018gl079439 · Cited by 51
Tully, C., Neubauer, D., Omanovic, N., & Lohmann, U. (2022) · Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics · doi:10.5194/acp-22-11455-2022 · Cited by 26
Delgado-Torres, C., Donat, M., Soret, A., Gonzalez-Reviriego, N., Bretonnière, P.-A., Ho, A.-C., Pérez-Zanón, N., Samsó, M., & Doblas-Reyes, F. J. (2023) · Environmental Research Letters · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/acbbe1 · Cited by 25
Metadata
- Authors
- Wilks, D. S.
- Venue
- Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
- Publisher
- American Meteorological Society
- Published
- 2016-12
- Volume
- 97
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 2263-2273
- ISSN
- 0003-0007 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-0477
- OpenAlex
- W2293053967
- Cited by
- 895
- References
- 18
- FWCI
- 56.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: “The Stippling Shows Statistically Significant Grid Points”: How Research Results are Routinely Overstated and Overinterpreted, and What to Do about It. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1175/bams-d-15-00267.1
- The paper
- Wilks, D. S. (2016). “The Stippling Shows Statistically Significant Grid Points”: How Research Results are Routinely Overstated and Overinterpreted, and What to Do about It. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. https://doi.org/10.1175/bams-d-15-00267.1
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.