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by garden_hermit 2102 days ago
I guess I fall under the field of "Progress Studies" though I think I'm much less concerned with the replication crisis than most.

Most new social science research is wrong. But the research that survives over time will have a higher likelihood of being true. This is because a) it is more likely to have been replicated, b) its more likely to have been incorporated into prevailing theory, or even better, have survived a shift in theory, and c) is more likely to have informed practical applications or policy, with noticeable effect.

Physics and other hard sciences have a quick turnaround from publication to "established knowledge". But good social science is Lindy. So skip all the Malcolm Gladwell books and fancy psych findings, and prioritize findings that are still in use after 10 or 20 years.

1 comments

> This is because a) it is more likely to have been replicated, b) its more likely to have been incorporated into prevailing theory, or even better, have survived a shift in theory

Not if this article is to be believed! He claims that studies that could not be replicated are about as likely to be cited as studies which are. That implies the problem may instead get worse and worse, the structure more and more shaky as time goes on.

Citation is not an endorsement—plenty of things are disagreed with in order to disagree with something, reference history in a field, or contextualize a result against past findings.

Here, the author seems to only look at recent papers, and so we don't really get to see how the citation patterns have evolved over 10, 20, or 30 years. But even then, established ideas tend to not be cited at all— the concept of "knowledge spillovers", for example, is common in Economics and other fields, yet the original reference is rarely used. Other times, more established claims will be encoded in a book or some work of theory—and people will cite the theory rather than the paper that made the original claim.