Thursday, September 3, 2015

Reproducibility project: A front row seat

A recent paper in Science reports the results of a large-scale effort to test reproducibility in psychological science. The results have caused much discussion (as well they should) in both general public and science forums. I thought I would offer my perspective as the lead author of one of the studies that was included in the reproducibility analysis. I had heard about the project even before being contacted to participate and one of the things that appealed to me about it was that they were trying to be unbiased in their selection of studies for replication: all papers published in three prominent journals in 2008.  Jim Magnuson and I had published a paper in one of those journals (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition) in 2008 (Mirman & Magnuson, 2008), so I figured I would hear from them sooner or later.