Social Science Space

The Psychological Science Accelerator is a global network of more than 500 labs in more than 70 countries which aims to re-do older psychology experiments, but on a mass-scale in several different settings. The effort is one of many targeting a problem that has plagued the discipline for years: the inability of psychologists to get consistent results across similar experiments.

This Tuesday at 9 a.m., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be hosting a national symposium in response to the 200-page report: Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. The symposium will feature discussions on actions taken or contemplated in response to the report’s findings. Learn more or find out how to watch live.

The U.S. military’s innovation incubator, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has signed the Center for Open Science to create a research claims database as DARPA’s first step to assign a ‘credibility score’ to social and behavioral science research.

A survey by Nature found that 52 percent of researchers believed there was a ‘significant reproducibility crisis’ and 38 percent said there was a ‘slight crisis.’ Here, three experts give their views on the issue.

How can we create reliable and replicable political science data? A recent article in the ‘American Political Science Review’ focuses on text analysis and suggests ways to make these data sound and reproducible.

The problems associated with modern psychology are longstanding and cultural, with researchers, reviewers, editors, journals and news-media all prioritizing and benefiting from the quest for novelty, says Keith Laws.

A sense of crisis is developing in economics after two Federal Reserve economists came to the alarming conclusion that economics research is usually not replicable.

Psychology is still digesting the implications of a large study published last month, in which a team led by University […]

The Wellcome Trust, a large funder of biomedical research, is keen to ensure that the findings of that research are widely and openly shared. Here, Jonathon Kram and Adam Dinsmore from the trust’s evaluation team discuss why any apparent bias against writing up and publishing certain types of results would impede scientific progress.

A study of the 100 top journals in education research found that there’s still almost no effort made to replicate the findings they publish.

David Takeuchi argues that even if the FIRST act doesn’t pass, it is clear that U.S. politicians are demanding more of a say in federally funded research. While a push to ensure research remains relevant can be a good thing, scientists and politicians must not forget that initial outcomes do not constitute substantive evidence. Scientific integrity and replication shouldn’t have to be sacrificed in order to meet political time frames.