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Is It a Replication? A Reproduction? A Robustness Check? You’re Asking the Wrong Question

[Excerpts taken from the article, “What is replication?” by Brian Nosek and Tim Errington, published in PloS Biology] “Credibility of scientific claims is established with evidence for their replicability using new data. This is distinct from retesting a claim using…

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Which Journals in Your Discipline Score Best on the TOP Criteria? There’s an App for That

[Excerpts taken from the article “New Measure Rates Quality of Research Journals’ Policies to Promote Transparency and Reproducibility”, published by the Center for Open Science at their website.] “Today, the Center for Open Science launches TOP Factor, an alternative to journal…

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Replication of Cancer Studies a Failure to Launch

[Excerpts taken from the article “Trouble replicating cancer studies a ‘wake-up call’ for science” by Jack Groves, published at timeshighereducation.com] “Later this year, the Virginia-based Center for Open Science will publish the final two papers of an initiative launched in…

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Picking Significant Estimates to Replicate Can Induce “Replication Crisis”-Like Results

[From the paper “Statistical Methods for Replicability Assessment” by Kenneth Hung and William Fithian, posted at ArXiv.org. Note that H&K’s paper is primarily concerned with presenting an empirical procedure for addressing questions about replicability after correcting for selection bias. This…

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IN THE NEWS: The Atlantic (November 19, 2018)

[From the article, “Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses” By Ed Yong, published in The Atlantic] “The Many Labs 2 project was specifically designed to address these criticisms. With 15,305 participants in total, the new experiments had, on…

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BBC Radio Program on the Replication Crisis

BBC Radio just produced an interesting and balanced program about the replication crisis, with a focus on psychology. Interviewees include John Bargh, Susan Fiske, John Ioannidis, Brian Nosek, Stephen Reicher, Diederik Stapel and Simine Vazire. One of the highlights is…

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A Primer on Pre-Registration

[From the article “The preregistration revolution” by Brian Nosek, Charles Ebersole, Alexander DeHaven, and David Mellor, published in PNAS] “Progress in science relies in part on generating hypotheses with existing observations and testing hypotheses with new observations. This distinction between postdiction and prediction…

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Pre-registration. From clinical trials. To psychology. Next, the world?

[From the article “More and more scientists are preregistering their studies. Should you?” by Kai Kupferschmidt, published in Science] “…Preregistration, in its simplest form, is a one-page document answering basic questions such as: What question will be studied? What is the hypothesis?…

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Big New Replication Study in Nature! Read All About It!

[From the abstract of the article “Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015″, published in Nature Human Behaviour by Colin Camerer et al.] “Being able to replicate scientific findings is crucial for scientific progress. We replicate 21 systematically…

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IN THE NEWS: NY Times (July 16, 2018)

[From the article “Psychology Itself Is Under Scrutiny” by Benedict Carey, published in the NY Times]  “The urge to pull down statues extends well beyond the public squares of nations in turmoil. Lately it has been stirring the air in…

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