In psychology experiments there are numerous other things besides the independent variable that can cause change in the measured dependent variable. In chapter’s two to five we discussed at length how chance and measurement variability (or error) can produce the appearance of differences. We also discussed choices that experimenters can make when designing their experiments to reduce the influence of chance, such as increasing the number of observations, increasing the number of subjects, and improving measurement precision.

Notice, that Google tells you how many times the paper has been cited, this can give you a clue about whether the paper has been influential in the literature.