Journal article

The reliability of replications: a study in computational reproductions

BP2-STS

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  • 2025
Published in:
  • Royal Society Open Science. - The Royal Society. - 2025, vol. 12, no. 3
English This study investigates researcher variability in computational reproduction, an activity for which it is least expected. Eighty-five independent teams attempted numerical replication of results from an original study of policy preferences and immigration. Reproduction teams were randomly grouped into a ‘transparent group’ receiving original study and code or ‘opaque group’ receiving only a method and results description and no code. The transparent group mostly verified original results (95.7% same sign and p-value cutoff), while the opaque group had less success (89.3%). Seconddecimal place exact numerical reproductions were less common (76.9 and 48.1%). Qualitative investigation of the workflows revealed many causes of error, including mistakes and procedural variations. When curating mistakes, we still find that only the transparent group was reliably successful. Our findings imply a need for transparency, but also more. Institutional checks and less subjective difficulty for researchers ‘doing reproduction’ would help, implying a need for better training. We also urge increased awareness of complexity in the research process and in ‘push button’ replications.
Faculty
Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
Department
Département de travail social, politiques sociales et développement global
Language
  • English
Classification
Demography, sociology, statistics
License
CC BY
Open access status
gold
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/331500
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