Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A direct replication of a 2012 priming study published as a registered report in 2023
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A study using similar methods but addressing a new question is an original study, not a replication
Editorial commentary
A replication study is a new study that repeats the design and procedures of a prior study, using an independently collected sample, to test whether the original result recurs. Replication results contribute to cumulative evidence regardless of direction: a successful replication strengthens confidence in a finding, and a failed one is itself informative rather than a wasted study, which is why replication studies are increasingly publishable in their own right rather than treated as unpublishable “just confirmation.”
Direct and conceptual replication
A direct (or exact) replication repeats the original procedures, measures, and population as closely as feasible. A conceptual replication tests the same underlying hypothesis using deliberately different operationalizations, methods, or populations, to check whether the finding generalizes beyond the exact conditions of the original study. Both are legitimate; which is appropriate depends on what question the replication is meant to answer, and CASRAI does not attempt to teach the statistical mechanics of either here.
What it is not
A replication study is distinct from a computational reproducibility check, which reruns the same data and code to confirm the same result was computed correctly — that verification step, not a new data collection effort, is what “reproducible” narrowly means in the methods-reproducibility sense; see reproducible research practices and inferential reproducibility for the fuller breakdown of reproducibility types. A replication study is also distinct from a many-analysts study, which holds the data fixed and varies the analysts, and from a crowdsourced replication, which distributes the same replication protocol across many independent labs simultaneously.
In practice
Major replication initiatives — the Reproducibility Project: Psychology and the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology among them — have found highly variable success rates across fields, which is part of why journals and funders now expect a replication protocol to be registered in advance, deviations from the original procedure disclosed, and publication venues to accept null replications rather than only replications that succeed. A registered-report format, where the protocol is peer-reviewed before results exist, is increasingly used specifically for replication work. See also robustness check and generalisability for related but distinct concepts.
References
- Open Science Collaboration 2015 ‘Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science’ Science
- Errington et al. 2021 ‘Investigating the Replicability of Preclinical Cancer Biology’ eLife
Also known as
Direct replication · Conceptual replication · Replication
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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