Comment by brofallon

Sometimes I wonder if the discussion about p < 0.05 has diverged a bit from practical considerations. In my field (population genetics and bioinformatics) for instance, I'm not sure any current journal would reject a paper where primary result has p=0.051 but accept an (almost) identical paper with p=0.049. Most papers seem to involve many separate analyses that together tell some story, and that story may even be an interesting negative result (where p >> 0.05). Whether or not statistical significance is a useful concept at all is a separate question, but I suspect the discussion of whether the threshold of 0.05 is useful might be out of touch with actual practice.