Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences.

Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data1,2. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.8-27.6%) papers made data available to assess reproducibility and, for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6%, 95% CI = 45.8-60.7%) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4-80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production3,4.

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Publication Details

Journal
Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern
Published
2026-04-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48620/96835
Primary Topic
Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
Type
article
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article

Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences.

Jing Geng, Hansika Kapoor, Kamil Izydorczak, Jan Philipp Röer et al.
Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern
Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
article

Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences.

Jing Geng, Hansika Kapoor, Kamil Izydorczak, Jan Philipp Röer, Thomas Ostermann, Nigel Mantou Lou, Ilka H. Gleibs, Marta Kołczyńska, Eli Awtrey, Dmitry Sergeevich Grigoryev, Shilaan Alzahawi, Andrew H. Tyner, Tabaré Capitán, Daniel C. Molden, An-Chiao Liu, Ljiljana B. Lazarević, Mariah F. Purol, Victor Gay, William J. Chopik, Krystal Hahn, Tom Coupé, Olivia Miske, Elif Gizem Demirag Burak, Johanna Gereke, John Wills Lloyd, Kai J. Jonas, Laura Caquelin, Thomas Rhys Evans, Henk Berkman, Esteban Méndez, Sara Capitán, Claudia Neuendorf, Felix S. Bethke, Jianhua Duan, Radoslaw Panczak, Pavol Kačmár, Noah Haber, Johannes Michalak, Marcel Martončik, Sean Dae Houlihan, Nicholas Gunby, Kim Peters, Nathan Fiala, Brinna Mawhinney, Abiola Oyebanjo, Kent Jason Cheng, Jamie Cummins, Marco Ramljak, Christopher Limnios, Zachariah Berry, Austin Lee Nichols, Mason Daley, Kevin M Esterling, Timothy F Brady, Gwen-Jiro Clochard, Yuri G Pavlov, David Kretschmer, Arran T Reader, Sanghyun Hong, Nate Breznau, Ivan Ropovik, Bert N Bakker, Mirka Dirzo, Faisal Mushtaq, František Bartoš, Sebastian Karcher, Gustav Nilsonne, W Robert Reed, Kathleen Schmidt, Melissa Kline Struhl, Nick Huntington-Klein, James Field, Noemi Peter, Erick Axxe, Alexander O Savi, Paul H P Hanel, James Bailey, Richard E Lucas, Nikita Mehta, Saule Anafinova, Nicholas Fox, Matúš Adamkovič, Anna Lou Abatayo, Daniel J Mallinson, Amélie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe, Ernest O'Boyle, Priya Silverstein, Maximilian Maier, Zoran Pavlović, Jessica C Lee, Jeewon Oh, Ruben Lopez-Nicolas, Gabriel Banik, Nathaniel D Porter, Katelin E Leahy, Theresa Stankov, Arathy Puthillam, Akshaya Balaji, Michael C McCall, Kristin Jankowsky
article en

Abstract

Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data1,2. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.8-27.6%) papers made data available to assess reproducibility and, for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6%, 95% CI = 45.8-60.7%) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4-80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production3,4.

Open Access CRIS of the University of Bern
Consumer Product Testing Company (United States) (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 18%
Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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