2 ms·
Nobody is going to do this on their free time. We have our own work to do, and our own milestones to keep funding bodies happy in order to be able to keep doing
by kergonath 3y ago
Nobody is going to do this on their free time. We have our own work to do, and our own milestones to keep funding bodies happy in order to be able to keep doing research. So you’d need to set up a system from scratch to pay for (sometimes very expensive; a neutron source does not come cheap) replication studies. And then you get perverse incentives because reviewers can benefit financially or materially from this.
The way it works now is already reasonable, actually. One paper is not a proof of anything, it is a claim. A ground-breaking article starts a gold rush of people who want to be where the action is, which leads to a lot of follow-up or exploratory studies, which leads to independent verification and replication. At this point, the initial claim starts being accepted. For all the noise in mainstream media, something does not become the state of knowledge after a single article. This is actually quite robust because that system works even if individual articles are unreliable.