Investigating the Reproducibility of the Social and Behavioural Sciences

Victor Gay, Olivia Miske, Brian A. Nosek () and Timothy M. Errington
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Victor Gay: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Olivia Miske: Center for Open Science Charlottesville
Brian A. Nosek: University of Virginia, Center for Open Science Charlottesville
Timothy M. Errington: Center for Open Science Charlottesville

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Abstract: Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data1,2. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.8–27.6%) papers made data available to assess reproducibility and, for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 out of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6%, 95% CI = 45.8–60.7%) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4–80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production.

Keywords: Scientific community; Social sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
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Published in Nature, 2026, 652, pp.126-134. ⟨10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05582856

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5

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