quality:corruption
Replication

A replication crisis in psychology has emerged. Many notable findings in the field have not been replicated. Some researchers were even accused of publishing fraudulent results. Systematic efforts, including efforts by the Reproducibility Project of the Center for Open Science, to assess the extent of the problem found that as many as two-thirds of highly publicized findings in psychology failed to be replicated. Reproducibility has generally been stronger in cognitive psychology (in studies and journals) than social psychology and subfields of differential psychology. Other subfields of psychology have also been implicated in the replication crisis, including clinical psychology, developmental psychology, and a field closely related to psychology, educational research.

Focus on the replication crisis has led to other renewed efforts in the discipline to re-test important findings. In response to concerns about publication bias and data dredging (conducting a large number of statistical tests on a great many variables but restricting reporting to the results that were statistically significant), 295 psychology and medical journals have adopted result-blind peer review where studies are accepted not on the basis of their findings and after the studies are completed, but before the studies are conducted and upon the basis of the methodological rigor of their experimental designs and the theoretical justifications for their proposed statistical analysis before data collection or analysis is conducted. In addition, large-scale collaborations among researchers working in multiple labs in different countries have taken place. The collaborators regularly make their data openly available for different researchers to assess. Allen and Mehler estimated that 61 per cent of result-blind studies have yielded null results, in contrast to an estimated 5 to 20 per cent in traditional research.