In this commentary we not only applaud Meyer, Witteloostuijn and Beugelsdijk (Journal of International Business Studies 48: 535–551, 2017) for their efforts to address long-overdue issues relating to the validity and power of empirical tests used by researchers but we also further comment on three of the best practices proposed in their work. Mainly, the false sense of security developed by scholars with regard to the software advances, the statistical level of significance and ethical issues associated with scholarly research. In doing so, we are sincerely hoping to strengthen the trustworthiness of international business scholarship within social science research as well as to contribute to the development of good practices and encouragement of ethical empirical research.