[From the editorial “SA Editorial About Next Phase of More Open Science” by Michael Seto, published in the journal Sexual Abuse]

“It is now widely recognized that there are publication biases toward novel and exciting findings, which has contributed to a replication crisis in the social sciences. In brief, large-scale efforts to replicate social science findings have revealed that a shocking percentage fail to replicate (see here and here). Publication bias discourages reporting of null results and reporting of straight-forward replication attempts. It is increasingly clear that we need to encourage replication.”

“Responding to concerns about replication, Sanjay Srivastava wrote a blogpost in 2012 regarding a “Pottery Barn rule” for journals (“if you break it, you bought it”), wherein journals take responsibility for the replicability of research it publishes by encouraging replication attempts.”

“One way to encourage replication attempts is to provide a peer-reviewed outlet for these attempts, whether or not they were successful. This idea has been taken up by some journals. It was introduced to the Royal Society Open Access journal, as described in this blogpost. and Psychological Science, a flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, also offers the option of replication reports, but only if preregistered.”

“We are therefore introducing brief replication reports as a new format for manuscripts describing the results of an attempt to replicate studies previously published in this journal.”

“We believe the replication report could be a particularly attractive option for file-drawered studies where replication attempts did not find statistically significant results and therefore were not submitted for publication or for student-led research where an attempt to replicate a previous study sets the stage for their original work.”

To read more, click here.