Workshop: Robust Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences, February, 2014, Arlington, VA

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This award supports a two-day workshop to investigate integrative policies and procedures that would promote robust and reliable published findings in science. Questions have been raised in recent years about the replicability of various findings in the biological, medical, cognitive, and social sciences. Making sure that scientists understand and are rewarded for using methods that yield the most robust results and incentivizing replication of results are among the many possible actions that could help ensure that published results are highly reliable. This workshop will explore these and other steps that might be taken to improve the validity of scientific findings.Scientists build upon published scientific knowledge in both basic and applied research. When those published results are not reliable, scientific discoveries can be set back and time and money spent on non-productive avenues of research. Additionally, science is often used as a basis for decisions in policy and industry, which also necessitate reliability. Social and behavioral scientists have contributed to improvements in experimental and quasi-experimental designs, methodological procedures (e.g., random assignment & blind procedures), and statistical (e.g., meta-analytic) techniques. The proposed workshop will convene social, behavioral, and statistical scientists to consider: (i) the state of the science, (ii) possible improvements in scientific practice and procedures, (iii) the implications for science education and training, (iv) the implications for editorial policies and procedures, (v) the implications for research university policies and evaluation criteria, and (vi) the implications for federal funding policies and evaluation criteria. This workshop will bring together experts in each of these domains to develop a coherent set of recommendations for ensuring that published empirical findings in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences are robust and replicable and to identify research needs on this topic. A written report from this workshop will be produced and presentation materials shared widely. The effort will be led by members of the Subcommittee on Replication, a part of the Advisory Committee of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation.