Are replication rates the same across academic fields? Community forecasts from the DARPA SCORE programme

Abstract

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) programme ‘Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence' (SCORE) aims to generate confidence scores for a large number of research claims from empirical studies in the social and behavioural sciences. The confidence scores will provide a quantitative assessment of how likely a claim will hold up in an independent replication. To create the scores, we follow earlier approaches and use prediction markets and surveys to forecast replication outcomes. Based on an initial set of forecasts for the overall replication rate in SCORE and its dependence on the academic discipline and the time of publication, we show that participants expect replication rates to increase over time. Moreover, they expect replication rates to differ between fields, with the highest replication rate in economics (average survey response 58%), and the lowest in psychology and in education (average survey response of 42% for both fields). These results reveal insights into the academic community's views of the replication crisis, including for research fields for which no large-scale replication studies have been undertaken yet.

Predicting replicability—Analysis of survey and prediction market data from large-scale forecasting projects

“…The data and results presented in this paper can be used for future forecasting projects that are either planned or in progress [ 14 ], by informing experimental design and forecasting aggregation. The results can also be used to evaluate the predictive performance of prediction markets against other methods [ 33 , 34 , 40 ].…”

“…Concerns have been raised about the credibility of published results following John Ioannidis’ landmark essay, “Why most published findings are false” [ 3 ], and the identification of a considerable number of studies that turned out to be false positives [ 4 , 5 ]. In response, several large-scale replication projects were initiated in the fields of psychology, experimental economics, and the social sciences more generally [ 6 – 14 ] to systematically evaluate a large sample of findings through direct replication. The rate of successful replication (commonly defined as a result with a statistically significant effect size in the same direction as the original effect) in these projects ranges from 36% to 62%.…”

Replicability, Robustness, and Reproducibility in Psychological Science

“…People disagree about which degree of replicability should be expected from the published literature (Gordon et al, 2020). To provide empirical input for these discussions, we provide a descriptive summary of recent evidence concerning replicability in psychology.…”

Transparency, Reproducibility, and the Credibility of Economics Research

“…Scholars working on this important topic have, for several decades now, continued to find significant room for disagreement on key issues of sampling, data sources, and statistical analysis methods, 20 matters on which well-intentioned researchers may well disagree. In this and other similarly contentious debates, we believe that the use of prespecified research designs and analysis plans could be useful for advancing scientific progress, a point we return to below.…”