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Researcher - iStock The replication success of scientific research is linked to research methods, citation impact and social media coverage - but not university prestige or citation numbers - according to a new study involving UCL researchers. Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ), the study explores the ability of a validated text-based machine learning model to predict the likelihood of successful replication for more than 14,100 psychology research articles published since 2000 across six top-tier journals. Undertaken in partnership with the University of Notre Dame , France, and Northwestern University , US, the study identifies several factors that increased the likelihood of research replicability - that is, the likelihood that if a study is conducted a second time using the same methods, the results would be the same. Overall, the authors found that experimental studies were significantly less replicable than non-experimental studies across all subfields of psychology. The authors found that mean replication scores - the relative likelihood of replication success - were 0.50 for non-experimental papers, compared to 0.39 for experimental papers, meaning that non-experimental papers are around 1.3 times more likely to be reproducible. The authors say that this finding is worrying, given that psychology's strong scientific reputation is at least partly built on its proficiency with experiments. The study also shows that an authors' cumulative publication number and citation impact were positively related to replication success.
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