Saturday, August 29, 2015

Many scientific studies can’t be replicated. That’s a problem.

Many scientific studies can’t be replicated. That’s a problem. - The Washington Post
Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time.
Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.
It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times.
The failure rate surprised even the leaders of the project, who had guessed that perhaps half the results wouldn’t be reproduced...

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