Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

7
  • Nice expansion of the terse second argument of my response. +1. Commented May 31, 2021 at 15:52
  • 2
    @CaptainEmacs Yes, a few answers (like yours, +1) touched on this, but I felt the presentation could be inverted - (ie: frame challenge - we DO repeat important results, with caveats that garbage tends to get ignored). The fallacy in academia is usually to fail to appreciate just how much research is not particularly useful, whether it's correct or not. I think that clouds the perception of how repeating experiments works. Commented May 31, 2021 at 16:03
  • 1
    Agreed - that's why I said "it reminds me" rather than "it's like" :-) On the other hand, I detest having to give significance statements as a reviewer, as they pretend to be objective whereas only the future can be. Even Adleman from RSA seems to have thought their paper was quite a minor result with no major relevance. Commented May 31, 2021 at 16:26
  • 5
    This answer matches my experience. My group normally replicate at least one or two plots from a paper we are building on, just to check our own data/equations/algorithms are good. Once we actually couldn't replicate part of a plot and we did discover an oversight in the other paper's methodology. It was minor, but important enough to mention in our paper. Commented May 31, 2021 at 18:52
  • 1
    Your comment goes hand in hand with the pther answer academia.stackexchange.com/a/168411/128758 "Because a culture of 'Argument from Authority' has built up that regards peer-reviewed journal papers as a scientific 'gold standard', rather than a work-in-progress in need of verification." Commented Jun 2, 2021 at 8:44