Studies

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A study entry records a specific, named investigation into a claimed paranormal or psychic phenomenon, an experiment, a data series, a controlled test or a documented field investigation, distinct from the phenomenon it investigates, which the atlas records under its own separate entry. The early card guessing experiments conducted at Duke University set much of the pattern later studies followed: a defined procedure, a specific research team, a stated set of results, and a debate over what those results actually showed.

An entry records who conducted a study and when, its stated method, and its reported outcome, along with whatever methodological criticism the study drew, since a study's raw statistical result and the scientific community's later assessment of its method are frequently two separate facts worth recording side by side rather than one substituting for the other.

Some studies recorded here produced results their own investigators considered striking, while later analysis identified a specific methodological flaw, an uncontrolled sensory cue, a selective reporting practice, that changed how the result is now read. The entry records both the original finding and that later reassessment as part of the same documented history.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi and Lorenzo Di Risio's meta-analysis of free response parapsychology studies works by gathering many separate experiments testing a similar claim and analyzing them together statistically, a method that can reveal a small but consistent effect no single study was large enough to establish on its own, or can instead reveal that an apparent pattern across studies is better explained by publication bias, the tendency for a striking positive result to get published while a null result does not.

That meta-analytic method is now the standard way parapsychological claims are actually evaluated by the field itself, rather than any single dramatic experiment settling a question on its own, and a study entry that records only one investigation's result without noting whether later meta-analysis supported or undercut it is recording only part of a much longer, ongoing scientific conversation.

A study entry therefore tries to place a given investigation within that longer conversation, noting whether its result has been replicated, folded into a later meta-analysis, or specifically challenged on methodological grounds, since how a single study's result held up under later scrutiny is itself part of its documented history and often the most scientifically informative part.