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How to make replication the norm

The publishing system builds in resistance to replication. Paul Gertler, Sebastian Galiani and Mauricio Romero surveyed economics journals to find out how to fix it.
  1. Paul Gertler

    1. Paul Gertler is a professor of economics in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

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  2. Sebastian Galiani

    1. Sebastian Galiani is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

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  3. Mauricio Romero

    1. Mauricio Romero is a graduate student in economics at the University of California, San Diego, USA.

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Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies1, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule2,3. That is not necessarily because funding is unavailable — it is because the current system makes original authors and replicators antagonists. Focusing on the fields of economics, political science, sociology and psychology, in which ready access to raw data and software code are crucial to replication efforts, we survey deficiencies in the current system.

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Nature 554, 417-419 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02108-9

This work was funded by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences and by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 22 March 2018: An earlier version of this Comment stated that only authors of non-replicated articles from the 3ie project described antagonism. It also gave the wrong number of replications. The data set is now available as supplementary information.

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Supplementary Information

  1. Gertler et al. Comment supplementary information
  2. Summary_3ie full data set

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