Epidemiological characteristics and prevalence rates of research reproducibility across disciplines: a scoping review of articles published in 2018-2019
- University of Ottawa, Canada
- Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil
- University of Toronto, Canada
- McGill University, Canada
- Stanford University, United States
- Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Canada
Abstract
Introduction: Reproducibility is a central tenant of research. We aimed to synthesize the literature on reproducibility and describe its epidemiological characteristics, including how reproducibility is defined and assessed. We also aimed to determine and compare estimates for reproducibility across different fields.
Methods: We conducted a scoping review to identify English language replication studies published between 2018-2019 in economics, education, psychology, health sciences and biomedicine. We searched Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature – CINAHL, Education Source via EBSCOHost, ERIC, EconPapers, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), and EconLit. Documents retrieved were screened in duplicate against our inclusion criteria. We extracted year of publication, number of authors, country of affiliation of the corresponding author, and whether the study was funded. For the individual replication studies, we recorded whether a registered protocol for the replication study was used, whether there was contact between the reproducing team and the original authors, what study design was used, and what the primary outcome was. Finally, we recorded how reproducibilty was defined by the authors, and whether the assessed study(ies) successfully reproduced based on this definition. Extraction was done by a single reviewer and quality controlled by a second reviewer.
Results: Our search identified 11,224 unique documents, of which 47 were included in this review. Most studies were related to either psychology (48.6%) or health sciences (23.7%). Among these 47 documents, 36 described a single reproducibility study while the remaining 11 reported at least two reproducibility studies in the same paper. Less than the half of the studies referred to a registered protocol. There was variability in the definitions of reproduciblity success. In total, across the 47 documents 177 studies were reported. Based on the definition used by the author of each study, 95 of 177 (53.7%) studies reproduced.
Conclusion: This study gives an overview of research across five disciplines that explicitly set out to reproduce previous research. Such reproducibility studies are extremely scarce, the definition of a successfully reproduced study is ambiguous, and the reproducibility rate is overall modest.
Funding: No external funding was received for this work.
Data availability
Data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/wn7gm/).
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Scoping review data on reproducibility of research in a 2018-2019 multi-discipline sampleOpen Science FrameworkDOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/WN7GM.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
Reviewing Editor
- David B Allison, Indiana University, United States
Version history
- Preprint posted: March 9, 2022 (view preprint)
- Received: March 10, 2022
- Accepted: June 20, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 21, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 5, 2023 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Cobey et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Epidemiological characteristics and prevalence rates of research reproducibility across disciplines: a scoping review of articles published in 2018-2019
eLife 12:e78518.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78518
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