LAUSR

Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. (2016) call for a renewed ‘positive focus’ on the goal of enhancing the prediction and treatment of depression. We share this goal and believe that our work examining positive focus and citation bias within the 5-HTTLPR × life stress literature (de Vries et al. 2016) and other work examining issues such as publication bias, analytical flexibility, and statistical power, far from being detrimental to the achievement of this goal, are an essential part of achieving it. Naturally, as with any other study, the study of bias needs to be as unbiased and transparent as possible. We have been fully transparent about our methodological choices: the article includes a supplemental table with the coding for all included papers, and the dataset, including both coding and citation frequencies, is also publicly available online (doi:10.5523/ bris.z7jconxfbmdr1jj3t0w4k1hwn) to enable the reader to reach their own decisions. We are pleased that Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. have taken the time and effort to examine this material. However, we regret that our message, regarding the need to value negative results as highly as we do positive results, seems to be undermined by what we believe to be unjustified concerns about the rigor of our coding.