The replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis most severely affects the social sciences and medicine, while survey data strongly indicates that all of the natural sciences are probably implicated as well. The phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience.

Because the reproducibility of experimental results is an essential part of the scientific method, an inability to replicate the studies has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the fields of medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results, to determine both the reliability of the results and, if found to be unreliable, the reasons for the failure of replication.

 

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