Great Idea

Great idea, and consistent with my growing skepticism of all published research given a general bias towards positive results.

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals:Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbedthe Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

I wrote about problems in research publishing here.

3 Comments

  1. IGotBupkis, Legally Defined Cyberbully in All 57 States:

    I concur. I'll call attention once more, in case there is anyone who hasn't read it, to an excellent 15 month old piece on the topic by Wolf Howling:
    The Scientific Method & Its Limits - The Decline Effect

    I've mentioned it before, but it's well worth reading if are new here or missed it.

  2. Mark2:

    What if it is all bunk within 2 standard deviations? They reproduce 5% of the studies, just cuz of the error rate.

  3. Ian Random:

    Wait, I thought science was perfect at least in the climate area. I wonder if the IPCC will try that. :-)