Psychology research: hopeless case or pioneering field? | Dorothy Bishop

A new Science study has highlighted a potential problem in reproducibility in psychology. But, as Dorothy Bishop points out, it's also the starting point for the revitalisation and improvement of science

Ever since Brian Nosek and his colleagues first set up the Reproducibility Project in 2011 many psychologists have been twitchy. The aim of the project was simple: recruit an army of experimenters, with the aim of trying to reproduce results from 100 articles published in three well-established journals in 2008. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, because in psychology, as in many other fields, there have been growing concerns that scientific results are often not reproducible, but there was no hard evidence as to how serious a problem it was.

A notable feature of the study was the care taken to liaise with authors of the original studies to ensure methods and materials were comparable. Also the researchers adopted transparent and audited methods for depositing data and summarising results. In addition, all replication studies had to have a sample size large enough to give convincing results - in many cases these were substantially larger than in the original study.