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The effects of the experiment itself upon the obtained results and, especially, the influence of a large number of experiments are extensively discussed in the literature. We show that the important factor that stands at the basis of these…
Replication is complicated in psychological research because studies of a given psychological phenomenon can never be direct or exact replications of one another, and thus effect sizes vary from one study of the phenomenon to the next--an…
Empirical science needs to be based on facts and claims that can be reproduced. This calls for replicating the studies that proclaim the claims, but practice in most fields still fails to implement this idea. When such studies emerged in…
Results in epidemiology and social science often require the removal of confounding effects from measurements of the pairwise correlation of variables in survey data. This is typically accomplished by some variant of linear regression…
Meta-analysis is routinely performed in many scientific disciplines. This analysis is attractive since discoveries are possible even when all the individual studies are underpowered. However, the meta-analytic discoveries may be entirely…
Science is a fundamental human activity and we trust its results because it has several error-correcting mechanisms. Its is subject to experimental tests that are replicated by independent parts. Given the huge amount of information…
It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most…
Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…
It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most…
The presence of latent variables can greatly complicate inferences about causal relations between measured variables from statistical data. In many cases, the presence of latent variables makes it impossible to determine for two measured…
The problem of individualization is recognized as crucial in almost every field. Identifying causes of effects in specific events is likewise essential for accurate decision making. However, such estimates invoke counterfactual…
Many researchers have identified distribution shift as a likely contributor to the reproducibility crisis in behavioral and biomedical sciences. The idea is that if treatment effects vary across individual characteristics and experimental…
Among plausible causes for replicability failure, one that has not received sufficient attention is the environment in which the research is conducted. Consisting of the population, equipment, personnel, and various conditions such as…
The replicability crisis has drawn attention to numerous weaknesses in psychology and social science research practice. In this work we focus on three issues that cannot be addressed with replication alone, and which deserve more attention:…
The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…
The sufficient-component cause framework assumes the existence of sets of sufficient causes that bring about an event. For a binary outcome and an arbitrary number of binary causes any set of potential outcomes can be replicated by positing…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
Large-scale replication studies like the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P) provide invaluable systematic data on scientific replicability, but most analyses and interpretations of the data fail to agree on the definition of…
Although living organisms are affected by many interrelated and unidentified variables, this complexity does not automatically impose a fundamental limitation on statistical inference. Nor need one invoke such complexity as an explanation…
Many published research results are false, and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework…