‘Doing good science is hard’: retraction of high-profile reproducibility study prompts soul-searching

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A retracted paper’s backstory illustrates the challenges of the technique called preregistration. Credit: Getty

The retraction of a high-profile paper 1 that tested ways to improve the soundness of scientific studies has highlighted the challenges of such ‘reproducibility’ research. The retracted paper’s authors include some of the titans in the field .

In the study, published in Nature Human Behaviour last November, the authors described a rigorous research protocol involving features such as large sample sizes, with the goal of ensuring the soundness of psychological experiments . The authors applied their protocol to dozens of research projects. They reported that as a result, 86% of replication attempts confirmed the expected results — one of the highest such “replication rates” ever recorded by such studies. But the journal’s editors retracted the paper on 23 September, stating in the retraction notice 2 that they “no longer have confidence in the reliability of the findings and conclusions”.

The authors agree with only one of the journal’s concerns, which the authors attribute to an innocent oversight. One of the authors, Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Nature that the group is working on a new version of the manuscript for resubmission.

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