Study aims to reproduce 100 published journal papers

(Press-News.org) This news release is available in Japanese.

Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published psychology studies; though they were able to successfully repeat the original experiments in most all cases, they were able to reproduce the original results in less than half, they report. The authors - part of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology, and led by Brian Nosek - emphasize that a failure to reproduce does not necessarily mean the original report was incorrect, but say that their results do provide evidence toward the challenges of reproducing research findings, including identifying predictors of reproducibility and practices to improve it. Nosek and colleagues were motivated to undertake this collaborative project given continued concerns regarding reproducibility across scientific disciplines. They designed an open study in which teams of psychologists selected studies for replication from the 2008 issues of three leading psychology journals, then conducted the studies, analyzed and summarized the data, and posted their methods on a public website for further scrutiny. Between November 2011 and December 2014, 100 replications of studies featuring many different research designs were completed by 270 contributing authors worldwide. Determining what constituted a successful replication was challenging, say the authors, as a replication can take varying forms, but Nosek and colleagues determined this through five complementary indicators. The most likely predictor of replication success, they found, was not related to the characteristics of the teams conducting the research (e.g., experience and expertise) but rather the variation in the strength of initial evidence (e.g., the original P value). A common convention is to treat P END