Class 7a: Why do we need theory?

Systems Biology

In 2009, 2% of scientists admitted to falsifying studies at least once
- 14% admitted to personally knowing someone who did
A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist’s experiment
- 50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments

reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals
36% of the replications yielded significant findings
- compared to 97% of the original studies
The mean effect size in the replications was approximately half the magnitude of the effects reported in the original studies

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association

Erika Check Hayden, Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility Nature, 11 November 2013
Open Science Collaboration, Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 28 Aug 2015: Vol. 349, Issue 6251, aac4716 DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716
Replications can cause distorted belief in scientific progress Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 41, 2018, e122 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000584. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2018

Reproducibility of Scientific Results Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
T.D. Stanley, Evan C. Carter and Hristos Doucouliagos What Meta-Analyses Reveal about the Replicability of Psychological Research Deakin Laboratory for the Meta-Analysis of Research, Working Paper, November 2017
Silas Boye Nissen, Tali Magidson, Kevin Gross, Carl T Bergstrom Research: Publication bias and the canonization of false facts eLife Dec 20, 2016;5:e21451 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.21451