Beyond Bonferroni revisited: concerns over inflated false positive research findings in the fields of conservation genetics, biology, and medicine

In 2006, Narum published a paper in Conservation Genetics emphasizing that Bonferroni correction for multiple testing can be highly conservative with poor statistical power (high Type II error). He pointed out that other approaches for multiple testing correction can control the false discovery rate (FDR) with a better balance of Type I and Type II errors and suggested that the approach of Benjamini and Yekutieli (BY) 2001 provides the most biologically relevant correction for evaluating the signifcance of population diferentiation in conservation genetics. However, there are crucial diferences between the original Benjamini and Yekutieli procedure and that described by Narum. After carefully reviewing both papers, we found an error due to the incorrect implementation of the BY procedure in Narum (Conserv Genet 7:783–787, 2006) such that the approach does not adequately control FDR. Since the incorrect BY approach has been increasingly used, not only in conservation genetics, but also in medicine and biology, it is important that the error is made known to the scientifc community. In addition, we provide an overview of FDR approaches for multiple testing correction and encourage authors frst and foremost to provide efect sizes for their results; and second, to be transparent in their descriptions of multiple testing correction. Finally, the impact of this error on conservation genetics and other felds will be study-dependent, as it is related to the number of true to false positives for each study.

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