The look-elsewhere effect is a phenomenon in the statistical analysis of scientific experiments, particularly in complex particle physics experiments, where an apparently statistically significant observation may have actually arisen by chance because of the size of the parameter space to be searched.[1][2][3][4]
Once the possibility of look-elsewhere error in an analysis is acknowledged, it can be compensated for by careful application of standard mathematical techniques.[5]
The term gained some media attention in 2011, in the context of the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.[6]