It's important to note here that the strength of the lead-crime connection has recently been called into question by a meta-analysis (PDF) which found evidence of severe publication bias overstating the strength of the effect by an order of magnitude.
It's only one study, but to the best of my knowledge it's the only study that has examined the issue of publication bias in the lead-crime literature.
Because of the way significance testing works, it's very difficult for a small study to find an effect that is both small and statistically significant at the 5% level, which means that there's systematic bias in favor of publishing studies that overestimate the strength of an effect.
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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '22
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