Questions arise over reproducibility in social, behavioural sciences

A study reveals a reproducibility crisis in social sciences, with only half of analyzed research findings being reliably replicable.

A seven-year-long project in the US that analysed 3,900 claims from research papers in social sciences has revealed that results from about half the papers examined for reproducibility were precisely reproducible as they yielded the same result when the same analytical method was applied to the same data.

The findings help provide a picture of scientific credibility in the social and behavioural sciences.

A random selection of 600 papers published between 2009 and 2018 in 62 journals and spanning across social and behavioural sciences was analysed for reproducibility, researchers including those from the U.S.-based Center for Open Science Charlottesville explained.

The scientific issue of 'reproducibility crisis' points to how about 60-70 per cent of scientists cannot reproduce results from their own or others' experiments described in journal-published and peer-reviewed studies, especially those in economics, political science, cognitive science and psychology, among other fields.

"We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 papers (53.6 per cent) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5 per cent) were rated as at least approximately reproducible," the authors wrote.

Irreproducible outcomes can occur due to coding mistakes, transcription errors or a faulty record-keeping, many of which are unintentional and all of which are unwelcome, they said in one of a series of papers that published findings from the US' SCORE programme in the journal Nature.