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by thisiszilff 2984 days ago
That's a good idea: encourage researchers to focus on a mix of replication and new research. When writing grants, a part of that grant might be towards replicating interesting/unexpected results and the rest for new research. Moreover, given that the experiment has already been designed, replication could end up demanding much less effort from a PI and allow his students to gain some deliberate practice in experiment administration and publication. On the other hand, scholarly publication might have to be changed in order to allow for summary reporting of replication results to stave off a lot of repition.
1 comments

My field has less of a "You publish first or you're not interesting" culture than many others, and part of what that is is recognizing that estimating an effect in a different population, with different underlying variables, is, itself, an interesting result all its own.

Tim Lash, the editor of Epidemiology, has some particularly cogent thoughts about replication, including some criticisms of what is rapidly becoming a "one size fits all" approach.