They found non-experimental papers to be some 1.3 times more likely to be replicable – that is, the likelihood that if a study is conducted a second time using the same methods, the results will be the same. The authors of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 30 January 2023, are Dr Youyou Wu of University College London in the United Kingdom, Assistant Professor Yang Yang of the University of Notre Dame in France, and Brian Uzzi of Northwestern. “But, it is a significant issue since the only way to prove one thing causes something else – like a certain diet leads to weight loss or a pill cures a disease – is by experiments.” It is not known why experimental studies are substantially less replicable than non-experimental studies across all subfields of psychology. It was a logical place to start our analysis and compare our findings to previous work.” “Psychology has been a leader in developing and testing methods and theory on replicability. It is especially important to the field of psychology, he told University World News. Findings that don’t replicate are flukes instead of facts.”

The results can be counted on to hold and work as expected again and again. “Replicability means that a scientific finding is a fact. Replicability is a crucial aspect of research, pointed out study co-author Professor Brian Uzzi, a professor of leadership at Northwestern University in the United States.

Research methods and citation impact can help predict whether research is reliable, but university prestige and citation numbers do not.

Tweet An international AI-powered study of more than 14,100 articles in top journals has confirmed the poor reproducibility of (especially experimental) research in psychology – a blow to the discipline.

Reliability in research