Science Alert May 25, 2021
A team of researchers at UC San Diego used publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of post replication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure. Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility. The authors of the study acknowledge that academics and journal editors alike feel pressure to publish ‘interesting’ findings that are more likely to attract attention but want to see research into how the quality of scientific papers can be improved. Whenever researchers cite work that is more interesting or has been cited a lot, the authors hope they will check if replication data is available and what those findings suggest…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Distribution of total citation counts and replicability. Credit: Science Advances 21 May 2021, Vol. 7, no. 21, eabd1705Â