Reporting bias

In epidemiology, reporting bias is defined as "selective revealing or suppression of information" by subjects (for example about past medical history, smoking, sexual experiences).^[1] In artificial intelligence research, the term reporting bias is used to refer to people's tendency to under-report all the information available.^[2]

In empirical research, authors may be under-reporting unexpected or undesirable experimental results, attributing the results to sampling or measurement error, while being more trusting of expected or desirable results, though these may be subject to the same sources of error. In this context, reporting bias can eventually lead to a status quo where multiple investigators discover and discard the same results, and later experimenters justify their own reporting bias by observing that previous experimenters reported different results. Thus, each incident of reporting bias can make future incidents more likely.^[3]