Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences
Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences
StatusPost-Print
Alternative title
Authors
Miske, Olivia
Abatayo, Anna Lou
Daley, Mason
Dirzo, Mirka
Fox, Nicholas
Haber, Noah
Hahn, Krystal M.
Struhl, Melissa Kline
Mawhinney, Brinna
Silverstein, Priya
Monograph
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Date
2026-04-01
Publisher
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Nature
Issue
Volume
652
Pages
Pages
126–134
ISSN
0028-0836
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Access date
2026-07-01
Abstract PL
Abstract EN
Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.8–27.6%) papers made data available to assess reproducibility and, for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6%, 95% CI = 45.8–60.7%) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4–80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production.
Abstract other
Keywords PL
Keywords EN
credibility
reproducibility
reliability
validity
economics
political science
psychology
marketing
sociology
finance
management
public administration
organizational behavior
education
criminology
health research
reproducibility
reliability
validity
economics
political science
psychology
marketing
sociology
finance
management
public administration
organizational behavior
education
criminology
health research
Keywords other
Sustainable Development Goals
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