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2 years ago in Academic Scholarship By Kenny Sebastein
What are the responsibilities of a scholar regarding the replication of their own and others’ work?
The "replication crisis" is a big topic in my field. As an early-career researcher, what is my role? Should I spend time trying to replicate foundational studies, or ensure my own work is perfectly replicable? What are the practical steps?
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By Trisha Answered 6 months ago
Your primary responsibility is to ensure your own work is replicable. This means pre-registering studies, sharing de-identified data and analysis code in trusted repositories (e.g., OSF, Zenodo), and documenting methods exhaustively. This is now a baseline expectation in many fields. Regarding others' work, direct replication studies are a vital scholarly service, though they are often undervalued. If you build on a prior study, include a "conceptual" or "methods-plus" replication as a preliminary step to verify the foundation. Advocate for norms that reward replication by publishing in dedicated journals (e.g., ReScience, Journal of Replication Studies) and citing them prominently. Scholarship is a collective enterprise; your duty is to strengthen its foundations, not just build new towers on sand.
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