Over decades, psychological journals have reported some very interesting studies conducted all over the world. A research team led by Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia decided to verify the results of some of the studies published in popular journals. The detailed analysis project has been termed as "The Reproducibility Project'.

270 researchers from different universities collaborated to check some Psychology-related studies published in three most read journals. The studies were published in year 2008. Similar issues exist in the field of medical research as well. Journals will have to employ more resources to scrutinize the study results before publishing them.

The research team conducted a rerun for 100 of the studies. The original researchers associated with the studies were also asked to join the project to verify the results of the studies conducted in the past. During rerun, only 35 studies could stand at the results originally reported. In 65 studies, it was found that the original study over stated the findings.

In the recent times, many popular journals have retracted research findings published after finding some issues with the reported data or study conclusions. As this new report has emerged, more doubt will be cast on the results of the studies conducted in Universities across the world.

The new study puts a big question mark on the authenticity of the studies, which are even published in some of the most read science and psychology journals. However, the research team member and co-author Cody Christopherson of Southern Oregon University said that their study doesn't mean that earlier studies were incorrect.

However, the Reproducibility Project has not found any evidence of fraud or that any original study was definitively false. The researchers mainly reported that the results were not as strong as reported in original studies.

Many a times, the research results can't be exactly replicated and there can be many reasons for them. Some of them are obvious while others are subtle differences. Christopherson added, "This project is not evidence that anything is broken. Rather, it's an example of science doing what science does. It's impossible to be wrong in a final sense in science. You have to be temporarily wrong, perhaps many times, before you are ever right."

"We see this is a call to action, both to the research community to do more replication, and to funders and journals to address the dysfunctional incentives," said Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science. Nosek led the current study with a group of 270 researchers.

Dr. John Ioannidis, a director of Stanford University's Meta-Research Innovation Center, who once estimated that about half of published results across medicine were inflated or wrong, noted the proportion in psychology was even larger than he had thought.