Studies that try to replicate the findings of published research are hard to come by: it can be difficult to find funders to support them and journals to publish them. And when these papers do get published, it’s not easy to locate them, because they are rarely linked to the original studies.

A database described in a preprint posted in April1 aims to address these issues by hosting replication studies from the social sciences and making them more traceable and discoverable. It was launched as part of the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT), a community-driven initiative that teaches principles of open science and reproducibility to researchers.

The initiative follows other efforts to improve the accessibility of replication work in science, such as the Institute for Replication, which hosts a database listing studies published in selected economics and politics journals that academics can choose to replicate.

The team behind the FORRT database hopes that it will draw more attention to replication studies, which it argues is a fundamental part of science. The database can be accessed through the web application Shiny, and will soon be available on the FORRT website.

Nature Index spoke to one of the project’s leaders, Lukas Röseler, a metascience researcher and director of the University of Münster’s Center for Open Science in Germany.

Why did you create this database?

We’re trying to make it easier for researchers to make their replication attempts public, because it’s often difficult to publish them, regardless of their outcome.

We also wanted to make it easier to track replication studies. If you’re building on previous research and want to check whether replication studies have already been done, it’s often difficult to find them, partly because journals tend to not link them to the original work.

We started out with psychology, which has been hit hard by the replication crisis, and have branched out to studies in judgement and decision-making, marketing and medicine. We are now looking into other fields to understand how their researchers conduct replication studies and what replication means in those contexts.

Who might want to use the database?

A mentor of mine wrote a textbook on social psychology and said that he had no easy way of screening his 50 pages of references for replication attempts. Now, he can enter his references into our database and check which studies have been replicated.

The database can also be used to determine the effectiveness of certain procedures by tracking the replication history of studies. Nowadays, for instance, academics are expected to pre-register their studies — publishing their research design, hypotheses and analysis plans before conducting the study — and make their data freely available online. We would like to empirically see whether interventions such as these affect how likely a study is to be replicable.

You can read the rest of this article by Dalmeet Singh Chawla in an article published in nature at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02598-w.