4 ms·

My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies. Studies that have not been replica

• eig 2y ago
  The problem with putting the onus on the journals is there is no incentive for them to reward replications. Journals don't make money on replicated results. Customers don't buy the replication paper they just read the abstract to see if it worked or not. I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people with results that have stood the test of time, but again, there is no incentive to do so. Institutions want superstar faculty, they care less about whether the results are true. The only real incentive that I think can be targeted is still grant money, but I would love to be proved wrong.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    If all that's true, we should just shut down all the science institutions across the board. They're worth nothing if they are not vigorously pursuing the truth about the world.
• scarmig 2y ago
  You should be able to build an entire career out of replications: hired at the best universities, published in the top journals, social prestige and respect. To the point where every novel study is replicated and published at least once. Until we get to that point, there will be far fewer replications than needed for a healthy scientific system.
  • bonoboTP 2y ago
    > social prestige and respect This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with rules and regulations, if people aren't impressed by it at a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail party at a conference, or when showing a politician around in your lab then nothing else matters. How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.
    • BobaFloutist 2y ago
      There absolutely exist skilled scientists that would happily make a living unglamorously replicating studies, if the money was there. Prestige is a nice motivator, but making a living at all is always the baseline, and is often sufficient.
    • jimbokun 2y ago
      There needs to be a new norm where prestige and respect is conveyed by having a replicated result. Not just the initial paper.
  • m_fayer 2y ago
    Similarly, ambitious and difficult experiments that don’t pan out should also be richly rewarded. You just did all of science the service of clearly marking that tempting path with a big “don’t bother” sign, thus saving resources and pointing the ship a little closer to the direction of truth.
    • creer 2y ago
      Yeah, this is something I don't fully understand. It's work to format and package everything for publication - and it's work which by then may have lost funding since it's failed. And by which time you might be discouraged. BUT like you say all the science has been done, and getting one more serious publication out of it should be rewarding. It's also a chance for the scientist to show that they were serious, competent, diligent in doing the work. It should count as well as a standard publication. It's a chance to collect consulting contracts later. Etc. Management and support should encourage these publications.
  • creer 2y ago
    Haven't you now created an incentive for replication fraud?
• mlsu 2y ago
  We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication. Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use to publish a replication of a previous $100,000 grant. Researchers can choose which findings they replicate, but with restrictions, e.g. you can't just choose your group's previous thing. I think if we did this, researchers would naturally be incentivized to publish experiments that are easier to replicate and of course fraud like this would be caught eventually. I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.
  • scarmig 2y ago
    > I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science. It might actually improve the pace of science, if the half eliminated were not replicable and the remaining half were written by researchers knowing that they would likely face a replication attempt.
  • breuleux 2y ago
    There would still be incentives for collusion (I "reproduce" your research, you "reproduce" mine), and researchers pretending to reproduce papers but actually not bothering (especially if they believe that the original research was done properly). Ultimately, I'm not sure how to incentivize reproduction of research: it's very easy to fake a successful reproduction (you already know the results, and the original researcher will not challenge you), so you don't want to reward that too much. Whereas incentivizing failed reproductions might lead some scientists to sabotage their own reproduction efforts in ways that are subtle enough to have plausible deniability. Proceeding by pairs is probably not enough. You probably need 5-6 replications per paper to make sure that at least one attempt is honest and competent, and make the others afraid to do the wrong thing and stand out.
    • jimbokun 2y ago
• waveBidder 2y ago
  journals have zero incentives to care about any of this.
• calebh 2y ago
  This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers. Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for support. My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm that ended up working the best was from one of the more unknown papers, with few citations.
  • ammbauer 2y ago
    Name and shame :)
    • robotelvis 2y ago
      Calling out bad work is career suicide. You are defecting on your tribe. That’s half of the problem.
      • bernawil 2y ago
        can't you do it anonymously?
  • creer 2y ago
    Beautiful. And thanks for the testimony. Ironically, this may have helped your product or research: Yes you spent more time on the BS, but in the end you found and used an algorithm both better and more obscure. While your competitors struggled with worse ones. Messed up incentives again.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  I think it’s a great idea. It would also give the army of phds an endless stream of real tangible work and a way to quickly make a name for themselves by disproving results.
• snowwrestler 2y ago
  Replications are not very scientifically useful. If there were flaws in the design of the original experiment, replicating the experiment will also replicate the flaws. What we should aim for is confirmation: a different experiment that tests the underlying phenomenon that was the subject of the first paper.
  • projektfu 2y ago
    Replications don't frequently get published but they do get attempted, because any decent researcher is going to replicate a result they rely on to build the next step. Unfortunately, you can get stuck in the mud as I did and be unable to replicate the prior findings. Is it technique or were the original results in error? We'll never know. Building more results without replications is what caused the psychology crisis. Apparently every lab accepted the p<0.05 results or stated correlations of prior studies and just ran more studies until they got their own that was publishable. Since everyone "knew" that the prior result was true, like priming or whatever, they could conclude anything they wanted, because ex absurdum quodlibet.
    • Zamiel_Snawley 2y ago
      Reproducibility should be a fundamental quality of published experiments. If the published work under specifies the experiment such that it is unreproducible, that means the results can’t be reliably extrapolated because there are unstated conditions.
      • projektfu 2y ago
        Well, yeah, but there are established techniques that are still very finicky. For example, staining frozen sections with fluorescent antibodies can go wrong in many ways and favors the experienced. Electron microscopy can take a lot of training to get right, and also requires careful staining techniques to get meaningful results. RNA work (e.g. FISH) is very sensitive to the presence of RNase which is ubiquitous and difficult to exclude from preparations. So a procedure can be specified that is reproducible but getting the same conditions is more difficult than, say, using Nix.
• breuleux 2y ago
  I'd be careful about that. Faking replications is even easier than faking research, so if you place a lot of importance on them, expect the rate of fraud in replication studies to explode. This is a very difficult problem to solve.
  • jimbokun 2y ago
    To elaborate, you need to give equal value to well implemented studies failing to replicate a result, as you do to studies replicating a result.
    • breuleux 2y ago
      Well of course, but I don't think that would necessarily help much. The point is that you don't really need to do anything: you know what the results should be, and you know you are unlikely to get pushback, so there's only an incentive to do the strict minimum to create plausibility that you ran the experiments. Basically, I think there is a sizable risk that a large number of replications would be fraudulent or half-assed, which dilutes their value. Paradoxically, the more this policy suppresses fraud or mistakes in original research, the less people will perform replication in good faith. I could be wrong, but people are endlessly creative at subverting systems when the stakes are high, so I'm wary of simple solutions. To be fair, it's probably better than the current system, just not as much as we'd like.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them. unless there are grants specifically for that purpose, then it's not going to happen; and it's hard to apply for a grant just to replicate someone else's results verbatim. (usually you're testing the theory but with a different experiment and set of data which is much more interesting than simply repeating what they did with their data; in fact replicating it with a different set of data is important in order to see if the results weren't cherry-picked to fit the original dataset).
• creer 2y ago
  It seems surprisingly hard to counter scientific fraud via a system change. The incentives are messed up all the way around. If the older author is your advisor and you feel one of their juniors is cutting corners or the elder is cutting corners, you better think twice about what move will help your career. If confirming a recent result counts toward tenure, then presto you have an incentive for fraudulent replication (what's the chance it's incorrect anyway? The original author is a big shot.) Going against the previous acclaimed result takes guts especially in a small field where it might kill your career if YOU got it wrong somehow - So you need to have much stronger results than the original research, and good luck with that. We might say "this is perfect work for aspiring student researchers, and done all the time" - to reimplement some legendary science experiment - but no, not when it's a leading edge poorly understood experiment, and not when that same grad student is already running to try and produce original research themselves. The big funders might dedicate money to replicated research that everybody is enthusiastic about (before everyone relies on it). But some research takes years to run. Other research is at the edge of what's possible. Other research is led by a big shot nobody dares to take on. Etc etc. So where is the incentive then? The incentive might be to take the money, fully intending to return an inconclusive result. Some research is taken on now. But only AFTER it's relied on by lots of people. Or much later when better ideas had the time to emerge on how to test the idea more cleverly i.e. cheaper and faster. And that's not great because costly in all the wasted effort by others, based on a fraudulent result. And all the mindshare the bad result now has. This is messed up.