We have a new paper out! It is titled ‘Replication after Collins: An ethnography of current replication studies in psychology’, and it has been published online first in Social Studies of Science. Focusing on the psychological replications in our sample, as the title indicates, we compare our findings to those of the classic studies of replication that were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s by sociologists of science, prime among them Harry Collins. Such a comparison is timely, since science has changed in the intervening 40+ years, and Collins and colleagues mainly looked at replication in the natural sciences. The paper is open access and you can find it here.
The abstract:
Ethnography and other empirical studies of replication played a significant role in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) during the 1970s and 1980s. Collins and other proponents of SSK highlighted that exact replication was impossible, knowledge was often tacit and hard to explicate, and that results were always socially negotiated. We revisit these observations and compare them with our ethnography of current replication practices in psychology. We highlight the diversity of negotiations, tacit knowledge, and practices surrounding replication more generally. We also examine how replication encourages and necessitates reflection on the research process—on what should count as the same experiment and the same result, on the role of tacit knowledge (such as skill, experience, judgment, and feeling) in science, and on what replication entails and whether it is worth the effort. Researchers who conduct replications can be seen as ethnographers of their science, reflecting on the scientific process and the challenges of producing results.
Replication in Action 