What it meant was that Solomon’s promising results had run afoul of a statistical concept you may never have heard of: statistical significance. Your statistical results are either significant, meaning they are reliable, or not significant, indicating an unacceptably high chance that they were just a fluke. He co-authored a call to abolish the notion of statistical significance, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature this year. “I think it will be easier to weed out the bad work.”Not everybody buys the idea of doing away with statistical significance. McShane said that although calls for abolishing statistical significance have been raised for years, there seems to be more momentum lately.