The Importance of Publishing Replication Studies in Academic Journals
September 1, 2014
The article titled Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters on Slate discusses the issue of the lack of replication studies published in academic journals. In most cases, journals are looking for new information, exciting information, which will draw in their readers. While that is only to be expected, it can also cause huge problems in scientific method. Replication studies are important because science is built on laws. If a study cannot be replicated, then it’s finding should not be taken for granted. The article states,
“Since journal publications are valuable academic currency, researchers—especially those early in their careers—have strong incentives to conduct original work rather than to replicate the findings of others. Replication efforts that do happen but fail to find the expected effect are usually filed away rather than published. That makes the scientific record look more robust and complete than it is—a phenomenon known as the “file drawer problem.””
When scientists have an incentive to get positive results from a study, and little to no incentive to do replication studies, the results are obvious. Manipulation of data occurs, and few replication studies are completed. This also means that when the rare replication study is done, and refutes the positive finding, the scientist responsible for the false positive is a scapegoat for a much larger problem. The article suggests that academic journals encouraging more replication studies would assuage this problem.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
