Publication Bias:A call for improved meta-analytic practice in the organizational sciences George C. Banks, Sven Kepes and Michael A. McDaniel Virginia Commonwealth University, 301 West Main Street, PO Box 844000, Richmond, VA 23284, USA. banksgc@vcu.edu Previous research has introduced the threat of publication bias to meta-analytic reviews in management and industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology research. However, a compre- hensive review of top-tier journals demonstrates that more than two thirds of meta-analytic studies in management and I/O psychology ignore the issue. Of the studies that do empiri- cally evaluate publication bias, almost all use methods that are based on problematic assumptions (e.g., the Failsafe N and subgroup comparisons by source of data).The current paper reviews the issue of publication bias and introduces to management and I/O psychol- ogy new methodological techniques to assess this bias.To illustrate the methods, multiple publication bias methods are demonstrated in a meta-analytic review of conditional reason- ing tests for aggression.We offer specific recommendations that address both design and analysis issues to mitigate the existence and influence of publication bias. 1. Introduction P ublication bias exists to the extent that available research results are unrepresentative of all research results.The typical consequence of publication bias is an overestimation of effect sizes (Dickersin, 2005; McDan- iel, Rothstein, & Whetzel, 2006). It has been proposed that publication bias is one of the greatest threats to the validity of meta-analytic reviews (Banks & McDaniel, 2011; Rothstein, Sutton, & Borenstein, 2005b), and that such reviews are one of our most important tools for advancing science and evidence-based management (Briner & Rousseau, 2011). Therefore, confidence in the validity and robustness of our meta-analytic results is contingent upon the extent to which publication bias influences our research. Journal articles, books, and tutorials provide guidance on how to address the issue of publication bias in meta- analytic reviews (e.g., Berlin & Ghersi, 2005; Borenstein, Hedges, Higgins, & Rothstein, 2009; Hunter & Schmidt, 2004; McDaniel et al., 2006; Rothstein, Sutton, & Boren- stein, 2005a; Song et al., 2010). Despite this, the majority of meta-analytic reviews published in the top-tier man- agement and industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology journals continue to ignore this type of bias. In this respect, our literature lags behind related psychological, educational, and medical research. To demonstrate the degree to which our literature is methodologically behind other fields of research, we examined meta-analytic reviews published in top man- agement and I/O psychology journals. This review com- plements previous reviews of publication bias (e.g., Aguinis, Dalton, Bosco, Pierce, & Dalton, 2011a; Gey- skens, Krishnan, Steenkamp, & Cunha, 2009) by providing data from other fields of research as a comparison point.Additionally, our review complements and extends the work that was conducted by Ferguson and Brannick (2012), who obtained similar results in regard to general psychology. However, our review takes an additional step by illustrating that management and I/O psychology lags behind several fields in the evaluation and assessment of publication bias. We reviewed the literature from 2005 to 2010 (we choose 2005 as our starting point as it coincides with the release of a key publication, Publication bias in meta- analysis : Prevention, assessment, and adjustments by Roth- stein, Sutton, & Borenstein [2005a]). This period was thought to provide a representative sample of meta- International Journal of Selection and Assessment Volume 20 Number 2 June 2012 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA, 02148, USA