replication crisis

Researchers, says an experimental psychologist, generally know what they should do: Yet many researchers persist in working in a way almost guaranteed not to deliver meaningful results. They ride with what I refer to as the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known). My generation and the one before us have done little to rein these in.Dorothy Bishop, “Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility” at Nature That’s interesting, considering how often we were ordered to see science as the relentless pursuit of truth. If we start with something as basic as giving up gimmicks, maybe we’ll get further. She offers some thoughts on suggested reforms. Follow Read More ›

At Nature Human Behaviour, we are told that the replication crisis is due to lack of rigid adherence to such a theory: Science, he explains, is about accumulating sets of observations that occur reliably—the Sun appears at different places in the sky depending on the season and time of day; finches have different shaped beaks depending on what they eat. “That’s the raw ingredients,” he says. “To make sense of it requires a framework to say, this is how all these different facts fit together, and this is why.” We explain these observations by developing theoretical models—of how the Earth rotates around the Sun on a tilted axis, of natural selection. Cathleen O’Grady, “The replication crisis may also be a Read More ›