Terminal digit preference, terminal digit bias, or end-digit preference is a commonly-observed statistical phenomenon whereby humans recording numbers have a bias or preference for a specific final digit in a number. In
medical science
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practic ...
, this is often seen when recording measurements such as
blood pressure by hand, where those taking measurements will round to the nearest 5 or 0. The phenomenon has been blamed for misdiagnoses. Terminal digit bias has been used to identify errors in research, and is one method used in the identification of scientific fraud. Severe terminal digit bias has been found in datasets for scientific papers that were later retracted
See also
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Benford's law
Benford's law, also known as the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation that in many real-life sets of numerical data, the leading digit is likely to be small.Arno Berger and Theodore ...
References
Medical error
Quantitative research
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