Rafael Ventura (Duke University)
Science is a social enterprise. To make progress, scientists must assume that the results of others are at least in principle reproducible. But empirical studies show that researchers across different disciplines often fail to reproduce results from previous experiments. To explain this lack of reproducibility, two main hypotheses have been proposed: (1) publication bias is the main cause of low reproducibility; (2) lax standard of statistical significance is the main cause of low reproducibility. Here, I present a model to adjudicate between these two hypotheses. Model results suggest that publication bias may play a more important role than current levels of statistical significance in promoting low reproducibility.
