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Comment by derektank

12 hours ago

>Replicating a paper is just as valuable scientifically as publishing it, but how many careers advance through replication?

I don’t think this is true, especially for novel or unexpected results. I suppose it depends on what you mean by scientifically, and there is a debate in the philosophy of science about what the value of research even is, but a successful replication does not result in substantial updates to one’s beliefs in the way new research does. And if the goal of science is to change our beliefs and bring them closer to what is “real”, successful replications can’t be as valuable as the initial research almost by definition.

From a pure statistical perspective the first scientific paper shouldn’t update your beliefs as much as the independent replication study.

People don’t behave this way, but a high percentage of all papers have known flaws and that goes up even higher when you consider unknown flaws. Replication doesn’t own its own solve the underlying issue, but independent replication removes a huge range of potential issues on top of providing more information.

  • I agree, with the caveat that it probably matters how novel the paper is, the effect size, and the confidence interval. A reputed new psychological phenomenon I'd be more skeptical of than, idk, a newly detected exoplanet.

    That alleged superconductor from a few years ago - everybody kind of held their breath and waited for the reproduction.

Hello.

You have created a fraud machine. Why? With no answer checking then why not make up the most fraudulent crap you can get away with?

Examples: A huge portion of recent non-reproducable science papers.

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Your thinking, along with everybody that's doing this rat race is causing the pumping out of papers with questionable data, but very little to ensure we are actually making correct science.

It is true for mathematics certainly. I would guess it is less true for science per se.

I think successful replications are as valuable as the original research because they're not unsuccessful replications