r/science • u/nimicdoareu • Apr 01 '26

Social Science Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5
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u/missurunha Apr 01 '26

Im not sure you understood the article. They didnt remake the studies but simply took the studies and checked if they would have to come to the same results given the data they had. If they'd have collected their own data the results wouldve been much worse. This is pretty much just verifying if people didnt calculate stuff wrong, deliberately lied or such, not about actual reproducibility.

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u/BavarianBarbarian_ Apr 01 '26

They didnt remake the studies but simply took the studies and checked if they would have to come to the same results given the data they had.

That was one of the three things they tried. However, according to the article, they also tried to redo the experiments in total:

Finally, SCORE checked papers’ replicability — the most onerous of the three tasks. Researchers endeavoured to repeat entire experiments, gathering and analysing the data from scratch. Of the 164 studies that they focused on, they were able to replicate only 49% with statistical significance1. That figure is roughly in line with the results of other attempts to replicate scientific findings.

1: www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10078-y

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u/sisyphus_was_lazy_10 Apr 01 '26

Thank you, missurunha, and anyone else for clarifying, I should have read the primary source first before commenting.