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Record W2972475714 · doi:10.7717/peerj.7654

Rate and success of study replication in ecology and evolution

2019· article· en· W2972475714 on OpenAlexafffund
Clint D. Kelly

Bibliographic record

VenuePeerJ · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicMeta-analysis and systematic reviews
Canadian institutionsUniversité du Québec à Montréal
FundersCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsReplicateReplication (statistics)Evolutionary ecologyEcologyBiologyEvolutionary biologyComputer scienceStatistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The recent replication crisis has caused several scientific disciplines to self-reflect on the frequency with which they replicate previously published studies and to assess their success in such endeavours. The rate of replication, however, has yet to be assessed for ecology and evolution. Here, I survey the open-access ecology and evolution literature to determine how often ecologists and evolutionary biologists replicate, or at least claim to replicate, previously published studies. I found that approximately 0.023% of ecology and evolution studies are described by their authors as replications. Two of the 11 original-replication study pairs provided sufficient statistical detail for three effects so as to permit a formal analysis of replication success. Replicating authors correctly concluded that they replicated an original effect in two cases; in the third case, my analysis suggests that the finding by the replicating authors was consistent with the original finding, contrary the conclusion of "replication failure" by the authors.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.737
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.898
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Reproducibility · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.263
Threshold uncertainty score0.324

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.7370.898
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0050.005
Bibliometrics0.0130.013
Science and technology studies0.0050.013
Scholarly communication0.0100.012
Open science0.0060.010
Research integrity0.0070.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.546
GPT teacher head0.527
Teacher spread0.018 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
DomainReproducibility
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations65
Published2019
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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