Most standard hypothesis tests have high power only against a limited space of alternative hypotheses. With the advent of new tests for the same hypothesis, claimed to have higher power for some alternatives, but lower for other, the practitioner has to make a choice between alternative tests....

This article takes issue with a recent book by Ziliak and McCloskey (2008) of the same title. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that statistical significance testing is a barrier rather than a booster for empirical research in many fields and should therefore be abandoned altogether. The present...