

Ask HN: What are incentives for scientists to perform replication studies? - pgbovine

We often see headlines in print/online articles proclaiming "numerous scientific studies have shown that X causes Y".  My naive question is: What are incentives for researchers to perform replication studies?  It seems like the first published study gets a lot of acclaim and prestige within the research community, but it's much less prestigious to be like "oh, I saw that UC Berkeley economists did a study on dataset A, so I just used dataset B from a different country and replicated their study.  I achieved similar findings"<p>It seems like it might be difficult for up-and-coming assistant professors to make a convincing tenure case if they simply performed replication studies (seems like <i>originality</i> and 'being first' are more valued for tenure), and veteran researchers probably also want to venture out to perform new breakthrough studies rather than doing replications.  I'd like to learn more about the incentives that scientists have for performing replication studies; it seems like they're very important for making sure that results are robust, but I don't see any reason why an ambitious scientist would spend time doing them rather than doing his/her own original experiments.  thanks!
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hga
A key insight here is that in many fields you can implicitly confirm results
from a study by basing your own research on them. If the foundation is rotten,
you should be able to figure that out sooner or later, which will lead you to
trying to replicate the original results---initially, to see what you're
missing---and from there you are in a position to falsify them.

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russell
Replication is important because initial results are often wrong because of
misinterpretation of the results, experimental error, or experimenter bias.
Others in the field want to make sure their work is on strong ground.

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pgbovine
ah very interesting ... i guess replication studies are often done as like a
'step 0' of a new original study, just to make sure that the new study is on
solid footing and not based on results that are tenuous

