Over the past few years, science has suffered a bit of a blow in terms of credibility. For one, a celebrated social psychologist was actually caught fabricating his data and this led to the retraction of more than 50 retracted papers.

In another example, a yearlong effort to reproduce studies which had been published in three major psychology journals has found that half of the 100-or-so are faulty. “I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,” intimates Jelte Wicherts, who is an associate professor in the methodology and statistics departments at Tilburg University, Netherlands.

In response, University of Virginia psychology professor, Brian Nosek, notes, “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.” Nosek is also the executive director with the Center for Open Science, which is the nonprofit data-sharing service that coordinated this project. And this project was published, on Thursday, with a $250,000 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Furthermore, USC professor of psychology, Norbert Schwarz remarks, “There’s no doubt replication is important, but it’s often just an attack, a vigilante exercise.”

Dr. Schwarz, was not involved with any of the initial 100 studies they had re-examined, but he comments that each of the replication studies were, literally, never evaluated for errors in their design or in the analysis therein.
Finally, American Society for Cell Biology executive director, Stefano Bertuzzi, says, “I call it cartoon biology, where there’s this this pressure to publish cleaner, simpler results that don’t tell the entire story, in all its complexity.”