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Vox published an interesting story today about the replication crisis in science. If you’re not familiar with this idea, it’s the fact that a significant percentage of all of the peer-reviewed social science that has been published in the past can not be replicated by other scientists, which is a pretty clear sign that the claims made in the original papers aren’t true. How bad is the situation. This bad:QuoteIn an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.One 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies was able to replicate only 39 of them. A big international effort in 2018 to reproduce prominent studies found that 14 of the 28 replicated, and an attempt to replicate studies from top journals Nature and Science found that 13 of the 21 results looked at could be reproduced.So we’re not talking about a few bad papers we’re talking about half or more of all of the peer-reviewed papers being junk that can’t be replicated. In some cases, these bogus papers can spawn a whole cottage industry within social science or psychology which later turns out to have been a waste of time for everyone involved. In 2016 Vox published a story on this topic which included one particular example of this.
In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.One 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies was able to replicate only 39 of them. A big international effort in 2018 to reproduce prominent studies found that 14 of the 28 replicated, and an attempt to replicate studies from top journals Nature and Science found that 13 of the 21 results looked at could be reproduced.