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Short abstract:

We report on a replication of the social studies of replication conducted in STS in the 1970s and 1980s. We conducted an ethnographic study of 16 replication studies in social science to see whether the conclusions that Collins and others drew from their studies still hold.

Long abstract:

The idea that direct replication is essential to verify or falsify scientific claims is well established among scientists and metascientists. However, in STS it has been criticized. Since the 1970s sociologists, philosophers, historians and anthropologists of science have studied replication in practice and have shown that replication is considerably more complicated than it seems, and does not offer an objective criterion regarding the truth or falsity of scientific claims. Harry Collins’s work on replication in the 1970s and 1980s has been particularly influential. In this paper we report on a replication of these social studies of replication. Whereas Collins and colleagues focused mainly on natural science, we extend their work to social science, where replication is increasingly common but also controversial. We conducted an ethnographic study of 16 replication studies in social science to learn more about the motivations of replication researchers and the practical and methodological problems they encounter. Why do these replication researchers conduct replication studies, and how are their aspirations of reproducibility affected by the problems they encounter in conducting their replication studies? Do the conclusions that Collins and others drew from their studies still hold?