replication crisis

Coined in the early 2010s with growing awareness of the problem.

replication crisis (plural replication crises)

1. A crisis caused by the problem that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce, casting doubt on the meaningfulness of their results in light of the requirements of the scientific method.
   • 2015 November 2, Andreas Ortmann, “The replication crisis has engulfed economics”, in The Conversation‎, retrieved 2021-09-02:

     It is not just the social sciences that are in the grip of replication crises.

   • 2018, Brian M. Hughes, Psychology in Crisis, page 24:

     In any crisis, there are the people who ask 'Crisis? What crisis?' Psychology's replication crisis is no exception. Almost as soon as the Open Science Collaboration published the results of its reproducibility project, there were critics who complained that the work itself was an example of spurious research in psychology.

   • 2019, Ross D. Parke, Glenn I. Roisman, Amanda J. Rose, Social Development, page 59:

     One simple (albeit partial) solution to the “replication crisis” is to conduct studies that use samples large enough to produce good estimates of the associations of interest.

   • 2020, Vincenzo F. DiNicola, Drozdstoj Stoyanov, Psychiatry in Crisis, page 141:

     They argue that the larger part of the replication crisis is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework: […]

   • 2020 November 12, Will Douglas Heaven, “AI is wrestling with a replication crisis”, in MIT Technology Review‎, retrieved 2021-09-02:

     AI is wrestling with a replication crisis.

the replication crisis

1. All replication crises, in all scientific fields or specialties, viewed collectively as a unitary, single epistemic crisis.
   • 2017 February 1, Stephen Buranyi, “The high-tech war on science fraud”, in The Guardian‎:

     Even Arturo Casadevall, an American microbiologist who has published extensively on the rate, distribution, and detection of fraud in science, told me that despite his personal interest in the topic, my time would be better served investigating the broader issues driving the replication crisis.

• replicability
• reproducibility