Publication bias—selectively publishing studies with positive outcomes—poses a problem to science as it can lead to inaccurate reports of intervention effects. Sham and Smith (2014) found that the published and unpublished pivotal response treatment literature differed, calling for more investigation into behavior-analytic research for publication bias. In this study, comparisons between the published and unpublished literature on the Performance Diagnostic Checklist, Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Human Services, and the Performance Diagnostic Checklist-Safety were conducted across three effect size measures: percentage of non-overlapping data, improvement rate difference, and percentage of data exceeding the median. Generally published literature outperformed the unpublished literature, providing further evidence of an overselling of results in the field
