What are the roadblocks to successful scientific replications? | Pete Etchells

Replication is the bedrock of science. But what happens when a scientist can’t – or won’t – share the experimental materials that allow it? It’s a simple question, but one that’s essential to science: if I repeat an experiment, how reliably can I get the same result? But it’s a question that you can’t ask without the right materials. It’s like baking a cake – if you’re not given enough instructions in the recipe, or told what sort of ingredients you’re supposed to be using, you might end up with a carrot cake when you thought you were making a Battenberg.For psychological research, replication is big business at the moment. In August this year, the Reproducibility Project - a groundbreaking attempt to systematically assess the reliability of published psychological research findings - delivered a grim result. Of 100 experiments that were replicated, the original findings were only reproduced in just 36% of cases. Some news outlets saw this as an opportunity to take a dig at the entire discipline, as if this was somehow conclusive evidence that psychology wasn’t a real science. But low replication rates are an issue that extend beyond psychology – cancer biology is facing the difficult reality of irreproducible results, and a recent analysis of 67 economics papers found that even if the original authors helped out, only 49% of results were reproducible. Other outlets reported much more thoughtfully on the findings from the Reproducibility Project th...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Psychology Controversies Peer review and scientific publishing Source Type: news