ReproducibiliTea Journal Club - Sheffield December 2023

Webpage : https://reproducibilitea-sheffield.github.io/posts/2023-12/

Paper : Protzko, J., Krosnick, J., Nelson, L. et al. High replicability of newly discovered social-behavioural findings is achievable. Nat Hum Behav (2023). doi : 10.1038/s41562-023-01749-9

Abstract :

Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigour-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.05) in 86% of attempts, slightly exceeding the maximum expected replicability based on observed effect sizes and sample sizes. When one lab attempted to replicate an effect discovered by another lab, the effect size in the replications was 97% that in the original study. This high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries.

Neil Shephard (Research Software Engineer at University of Sheffield) will give a brief summary of the article and will open discussion by highlighting some of the points he thought were good/bad about the paper.

This time slot sits between sandwiched between Open Research Conversation x Lunchbytes : Making research software more visible and reusable - Open Source Software and FAIR4RS and the Annual Open Research Lecture.