Science is the best thing that has happened to humankind because its results can be questioned, retested, and demonstrated to be right, or even wrong, says the Guardian newspaper. Science is not about proving at all cost some preconceived dogma
But, some of the most high profile findings in social sciences of the past decade do not stand up to replication, a major investigation has found. The project, which aimed to repeat 21 experiments that had been published in Science or Nature – science’s two preeminent journals – found that only 13 of the original findings could be reproduced.The replications were high powered, with sample sizes on average about five times higher than in the original studies.These results show that ‘statistically significant’ scientific findings need to be interpreted very cautiously until they have been replicated even if published in the most prestigious journals,” said Magnus Johannesson of the Stockholm School of Economics, one of the project leaders.
https://lnkd.in/ef7_YNr
Similar results have been found in other fields. In 2015, an impressive collaboration of 270 investigators working for five years published in Science the results of their efforts to replicate 100 important results that had been previously published in three top psychology journals. The replicators worked closely with the original authors to make the repeat experiments close replicas of the originals. The results were bleak: 64% of the experiments could not be replicated. https://goo.gl/YMUJEF
