Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
The 2015 OSC psychology replication rate of ~36% of effects replicating.
- Is an instance
The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology's findings on the difficulty of reproducing landmark preclinical results.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A single failed replication of an individual study.
- Not an instance
Normal scientific revision through new evidence.
Editorial commentary
The “reproducibility crisis” (also called the “replication crisis”) is the widely reported finding that substantial proportions of published research, particularly in psychology, biomedicine, and the social sciences, fail to reproduce or replicate when independently re-tested. The framing traces to Ioannidis’s 2005 “Why most published research findings are false” and was given large-scale empirical weight by the Open Science Collaboration’s 2015 project, which attempted to replicate 100 experimental and correlational psychology studies published in 2008: 97 percent of the original studies had reported a statistically significant result, but only 36 percent of the replications did,.
Subsequent large efforts have found comparable patterns in other fields. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology attempted to replicate experiments from 53 high-impact preclinical cancer papers; documentation gaps and missing reagents or protocols meant only 50 experiments across 23 of the original papers could actually be attempted, and where replication was possible, originally reported positive effects replicated at a markedly lower rate than originally reported null effects, with substantially smaller effect sizes.
The framing itself is genuinely contested, not settled fact. Some methodologists reject “crisis” as overstating a normal feature of cumulative science and prefer terms such as “credibility revolution,” arguing the finding is better read as evidence the field’s own self-correction mechanisms are working, not that science is broken. The evidence also varies substantially by field and by sub-discipline — the figures above are not a universal replication rate. Either framing motivates the same practical reforms: pre-registration, open data and materials, and larger or multi-site replication designs. See replicability for the NASEM-convention distinction between reproducing a result from the same data versus replicating it with newly collected data, the reproducibility vs replicability comparison, and crowdsourced replication and many-analysts studies for newer designs built specifically to test how much a result depends on analytic choices rather than the underlying data.
References
- Ioannidis, ‘Why most published research findings are false’ (PLOS Medicine, 2005)
- Open Science Collaboration, ‘Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science’ (Science, 2015)
- Errington et al., Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology, eLife (2021)
- Baker, ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’ (Nature, 2016)
Also known as
replication crisis · credibility crisis
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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