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  • WORLD VIEW

The replication crisis won’t be solved with broad brushstrokes

A cookie-cutter strategy to reform science will cause resentment, not improvement.
By
  1. David Peterson

    1. David Peterson is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Alarm about a ‘replication crisis’ launched a wave of projects that aimed to quantitatively evaluate scientific reproducibility: statistical analyses, mass replications and surveys. Such efforts, collectively called metascience, have grown into a social movement advocating broad reforms: open-science mandates, preregistration of experiments and new incentives for careful research. It has drawn attention to the need for improvements, and caused rancour.

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Nature 594, 151 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01509-7

Editor’s note: Nature journals have embraced practices to promote robust practices and full, open reporting.

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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