About

Where the phrases come from

The seed list is Matthew Hankins' collection of specimens, gathered over years and posted publicly. Those 55 phrases are marked as confirmed specimens throughout the site, and each carries the p-value it was originally sighted at. The rest are variants we searched for on the same pattern.

How a sentence gets here

1. Each phrase is searched against Europe PMC, restricted to open-access articles with retrievable full text.
2. Every hit's full text is fetched and the phrase located in it. This step is not optional: Europe PMC's index ignores stopwords, so it returns identical results for not quite significant and quite significant. Roughly half of all search hits do not survive it.
3. The sentence containing the phrase is extracted, along with any p-value reported inside that same sentence.

The corpus currently holds 15,661 sentences from 15,527 papers across 2,972 journals.

What this is not

It is not an accusation. Hedged language is often the honest description of a genuinely ambiguous result, and a hard threshold at 0.05 is itself a convention worth arguing with. What makes the collection funny is the gap between the arithmetic and the adjectives, not the people who wrote them. No author is named anywhere on this site, and every sentence links to its source so you can read what surrounds it.

Maintainer

Citing this collection

@misc{barely_significant_2026,
  author = {Sofi-Mahmudi, Ahmad},
  title  = {Barely Significant},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://barelysignificant.xera.ac},
  note   = {Database, accessed YYYY-MM-DD}
}

Licensing

Sentences are quoted from open-access articles under the licences their publishers applied, with attribution and a link back to the source. The code and the phrase list are on GitHub. The data is available through the API.