A sweeping project involving hundreds of researchers in several dozen countries showed that across the social sciences, the findings of roughly half of all papers cannot be replicated independently, and there’s no reliable way to tell in advance which ones will falter. Called Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE), the effort investigated more than 100 papers published in dozens of leading journals in business, economics, education, political science, psychology, and sociology. The replication success rate — 49% for the 164 papers evaluated, reported today in Nature — is consistent with findings from previous studies in individual fields such as psychology, suggesting the problem is pervasive in the social sciences.

The study also suggests there’s no easy fix. The SCORE team hoped to identify key signatures that could be tied to a paper’s credibility and perhaps harnessed to give readers a metric for how confident they can be about the reported results. But the current effort to find this common denominator—which the SCORE team described early in the project as “aspirational”—mostly came up short, they describe in a package of Nature papers and separate preprints.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/across-social-sciences-half-research-doesn-t-replicate

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