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As science grapples with what some have called a reproducibility crisis, replication studies, which aim to reproduce the results of previous studies, have been held up as a way to make science more reliable. It seems like common sense: Take a study and do it again — if you get the same result, that’s evidence that the findings are true, and if the result doesn’t turn up again, they’re false. Yet in practice, it’s nowhere near this simple.
“Scientific claims don’t gain credibility by someone saying, ‘I found it.’ They gain credibility by others being able to reproduce it,” said Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, co-founder of the Center for Open Science and leader of the Reproducibility Project: Psychology. RP:P, initiated in 2011, attempted to replicate 100 studies published in three high-profile psychology journals in 2008. By this logic, a replication study’s purpose is to confirm a previously reported finding.
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Yet there are good reasons why real effects may fail to reproduce, and in many cases, we should expect replications to fail, even if the original finding is real. It may seem counterintuitive, but initial studies have a known bias toward overestimating the magnitude of an effect for a simple reason: They were selected for publication because of their unusually small p-values, said Veronica Vieland, a biostatistician at the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine in Columbus, Ohio.
Read full, original post: Failure Is Moving Science Forward
