The reproducibility crisis is the documented, ongoing finding that a large share of published results across psychology, medicine and other experimental fields cannot be reproduced or replicated when other researchers try. The Open Science Collaboration's 2015 project attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies and reproduced the original result in well under half of them; a 2016 Nature survey of over 1,500 scientists, cited here, found more than 70 percent had failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment. Its causes are debated rather than settled: proposed drivers include publication bias toward positive results, small sample sizes, the misuse of statistical significance as a pass or fail line rather than one piece of evidence, and outright questionable research practices, and researchers disagree about how much of published science the crisis actually touches versus how much is normal, honest variation between studies.
Facts
Proposed YearThe Open Science Collaboration's 100-study psychology replication project, published 2015, is the event most often credited with putting the crisis on the wider record; the term and the underlying concern were already circulating earlier and the recognition built gradually rather than starting on one date. Proposed ByOpen Science Collaboration 2 Sources
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