Evidence-appraisal glossary
False Discovery Rate
The expected proportion of false positives among all the findings a study flags as significant. Controlling it accepts some errors in exchange for detecting more true effects.
Also called: FDR.
In settings with hundreds or thousands of tests, such as genomics, insisting on zero false positives would bury almost every real signal. The false discovery rate reframes the goal: keep the share of mistaken discoveries among the declared positives at a tolerable level, say five or ten percent. Procedures like Benjamini-Hochberg rank the p-values and set an adaptive cutoff to achieve this. It offers more power than family-wise methods but delivers a weaker guarantee, so readers should know which kind of control a paper used before interpreting its list of significant results.
This is a plain-language methodology definition for reading research. It is general education, not medical advice.