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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

> this would seem to be a common occurrence and Science would have to decide whether to devote equal attention to every failed reproduction

I think the answer to this is a rather blatant “of course!”

If Science has the time to support false studies that retrograde the scientific cause, it certainly has the time to publish their corrections and refutations. The scientific process is not about how much stuff you can publish, it's about how much true information you can convey. A journal half the size of Science but twice as trustworthy is at least as valuable, if not vastly more.

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> I think the answer to this is a rather blatant “of course!”

It's not as blatant as you think. It takes experienced scientists to review submitted papers, and their time is an expensive resource. Is it interesting that a research team with a sloppy adherence to a methodology failed to replicate a study? Not really. Should Science give resources and a platform to people who are just careless researchers? Obviously not. It's easy to fail to replicate an experiment; just do a bad job.

There's an implication in your argument that the science posted in the journal is of a good enough quality to be published - otherwise why wouldn't you apply the same standard you are applying here? Doing a bad job isn't limited to just reproduction.

Considering the reproducibility crisis, is it your position that people are worse at reproducing research than they are at conducting it? An alternative interpretation would be that people have more incentive to publish hastily-made "failed to reproduce" papers than they have "findings" papers, but I don't think that's the case either, especially considering the reply from Science to this case.

I think the rationale for Science to say they already fulfilled their obligations the first time around is that they thoroughly scrutinized the methodology used the first time around. This is asking them to now scrutinize two methodologies used and for less payoff than the first time.

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