A Proposal to Advance Theory and Promote Collaboration in Tropical Biology by Supporting Replications

Abstract

Shifting the current research paradigm in ecology and evolutionary biology (EVE) to one that values replication of previously published studies requires both educating the EVE community about their importance and providing the incentives to carry them out. Academic societies are uniquely poised to do both, which is why we propose that the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) spearhead a Reproducibility Project in Tropical Biology – the first such effort in environmental biology – to encourage replicating some of the most important studies in this discipline in sites across the globe.

StomataCounter: a neural network for automatic stomata identification and counting

“…Automatic counters will have an objective measure, and introduce no systematic bias between compared sets as long as the same model is used. As the complexity of processing pipelines in biological studies increases, repeatability of studies increasingly becomes a concern (Bruna, 2014, Open Science Foundation, 2015.…”

From pre‐activation to pre‐updating: A threshold mechanism for commitment to strong predictions

“…In light of recent studies indicating a "replication crisis" in many research domains (e.g., Errington et al, 2014;Open Science Collaboration, 2015), the invaluable role of replication within the scientific process has become widely acknowledged (e.g., Benson & Borrego, 2015;Bruna et al, 2017;Burman et al, 2010;Fahs et al, 2003;Sukhtankar, 2017), prompting replication attempts within the sentence processing literature (e.g., Nicenboim et al, 2019;Nieuwland et al, 2018). The design of the current study enabled us to replicate the findings of Staub and colleagues (2015) regarding the effects of cloze probability and constraint on production latencies, as well as Ness and Meltzer-Asscher's (2018a) P600 pre-updating effect on the verb.…”

Striving for transparent and credible research: practical guidelines for behavioral ecologists

“…Replications are often difficult to achieve and can even be misconstrued as potentially damaging to the reputation of the scientist who produced the original results ( Ebersole et al 2016 ). Our field of research currently lacks incentives to promote replication, although many suggestions to promote replication have been proposed and could easily be applied (e.g., “replication reports” and similar [ Bruna 2014 ; Parker and Nakagawa 2014 ; Endler 2015 ; Open Science Collaboration, forthcoming ; Nakagawa and Parker 2015 ]). Therefore, replications that test and verify our results have remained rare or nonexistent ( Kelly 2006 ).…”