Paper short abstract

I discuss observations from my PhD research into practices of investigating misconduct in Japan, and specifically how replication of contested claims is sometimes used as a means to tease out and render available to investigators tacit dimensions of research management and work organization

Paper long abstract

While STS research has shown that replication experiments can surface tacit knowledge and locally sustain interpretative flexibility of experimental design and results, this paper examines their role in a different institutional setting: the investigation of research misconduct. Such investigations are formally structured by regulations, yet in practice leave considerable discretion to appointed investigators in allocating budgets and selecting, executing, and interpreting investigative methods. I focus on what happens when investigators commission the replication of contested research by the very authors under scrutiny.

Drawing on three controversies in the biosciences in Japan (2006–2014), I show that monitored attempts at replication enable investigators to reconstruct the organization of research in labs facing allegations, thus making tangible problems of authorship, hierarchy, and unevenly distributed responsibilities and risks that are otherwise difficult to access and articulate. In two cases, replication appears to have proven more useful as a probe of how experimental work had been conducted and coordinated, and not so much as a means to resolve doubts. A third case, in which investigators initially sought to avoid replication altogether and faced significant pushback on that, demonstrates the extent to which replications are expected to play a role in such inquiries in Japan, and how its absence itself became a point of contention.

Building on Sigl’s notion of tacit governance, I argue that misconduct investigators seriously engage tacit elements that surface during monitored replications: these provide invaluable narrative resources for transforming “case descriptions” into ordered judgments about responsibility, laboratory organization, and research culture.