A
"replication attempt" refers to the act of trying to repeat or reproduce a study or experiment in order to see if the same results can be obtained. It is done to check the validity, reliability, and generalizability of the previous findings.
Full definition
To learn more about what other
recent replication attempts of classic psychological findings have revealed, check out the latest issue of Social Psychology here.
The
failed replication attempt, which was published in PLOS One in 2012, was picked up by science journalist Ed Yong at his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog and attracted a lot of attention.
The Reproducibility Project now has dozens of participating psychologists working
on replication attempts worldwide.
«For us, these results are very encouraging,» says Susana Cebrian, a physicist at the University of Zaragoza in Spain who works on
another replication attempt, called ANAIS, in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory in the Pyrenees.
The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology core team would like to thank the original authors, in particular Joerg Huelsken and Ilaria Malanchi, for generously sharing critical information as well as reagents to ensure the fidelity and quality of
this replication attempt.
Surprisingly, the median tumor - free survival was 1 week in
this replication attempt, while 70 % of the control mice were reported to be tumor - free after 9 weeks in the original study.
The rapid tumor onset observed in
this replication attempt, compared to the original study, makes the detection of accelerated tumor growth in PREX2 expressing NRASG12D melanocytes extremely difficult.
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The replication attempt will also perform negative binomial regression analysis of the macrometastases count data.
Another replication attempt supported a 2011 Science Translational Medicine report from Stanford computational biologist Atul Butte's lab that the ulcer drug Tagamet slows the growth of lung tumors in mice.
Our failure to find similar results even after three close
replication attempts, along with the methodological and statistical issues discussed above and at least one other published report of a failed replication attempt [17], leads us to favour the «experimental artifacts» explanation for Bem's original result.
Power analysis using G * Power 3.0 [10] indicated that, to have 80 % power to detect the same effect size as that in Bem's original experiment (d =.42), we would require at least 41 participants in
each replication attempt.
This could be due to biological variability of the kinetics of engraftment and growth of systemically injected tumor cells, as well as differences in the details between the original experimental design and
this replication attempt that were not known or accounted for.
As reported subsequently in Nature magazine, only 39 of
the replication attempts were successful.
In
this replication attempt, a sample of 396 adults who were currently involved in a romantic relationship (half married, half dating) completed two surveys about 4 months apart.
More recently, psychologists have been trying to replicate some classic «priming» studies (see more here and here on this topic) with mixed results;
some replication attempts have been successful, while others have failed.