Small Act, Huge Effect: Algorithmic Sources of Publication Bias in Political Science Research

Meta-analyses continue to demonstrate the pervasiveness of publication bias in political science, and to emphasize the vested interests of authors, reviewers, journal editors and project sponsors as primary reasons. In this article, we reveal a hitherto unnoticed source of publication bias. By replicating 160 studies that have employed the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we show how the uncritical import of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm (QMC) from electrical engineering into social-scientific data analysis with QCA in the late 1980s has led to considerable publication bias over the last three decades. We also present a solution that is guaranteed to eliminate this source of bias. It consists in a redefinition of the objective function under which optimization algorithms such as QMC operate in QCA. Besides contributing to the literature on publication bias, our article thus also underlines the importance of evaluating the adequacy of foreign methods before putting them to uses which they were not originally designed for.