'The "Replication Crisis" Could Be Worse Than We Thought, New Analysis Reveals'
The paper is open access:The science replication crisis might be worse than we thought: new research reveals that studies with replicated results tend to be cited less often than studies which have failed to replicate.
That's not to say that these more widely cited studies with unreplicated experiments are necessarily wrong or misleading - but it does mean that, for one reason or another, follow-up research has failed to deliver the same result as the original study, yet it still gets loads of citations.
Thus, based on the new analysis, research that is more interesting and different appears to garner more citations than research with a lot of corroborating evidence.
Behavioral economists Marta Serra-Garcia and Uri Gneezy from the University of California analyzed papers in some of the top psychology, economy, and science journals; they found that studies that failed to replicate since their publication were on average 153 times more likely to be cited than studies that had – and that the influence of these papers is growing over time. ...
'Nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones'
Abstract:
We use publicly available data to show that published papers in top psychology, economics, and general interest journals that fail to replicate are cited more than those that replicate. This difference in citation does not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. Only 12% of postreplication citations of nonreplicable findings acknowledge the replication failure.
Existing evidence also shows that experts predict well which papers will be replicated. Given this prediction, why are nonreplicable papers accepted for publication in the first place? A possible answer is that the review team faces a trade-off. When the results are more “interesting,” they apply lower standards regarding their reproducibility.
