Replication of experimental results is important for building credible science, but replication studies are often difficult to find. A team of researchers wants to change that. They have begun publishing replication studies on the peer review platform PubPeer, along with links to the original studies.

There have been numerous attempts to replicate scientific experiments over the past decade, and many of them have failed to reproduce the original results. But the inability to find these replication studies easily wastes research time and resources. If scientists are unaware of a replication study, particularly one that was unsuccessful, they might cite the original research without knowing it has problems.

“If PubPeer can help people learn about replications, both successful and unsuccessful, that will accelerate the progress of science by facilitating scientific self-correction,” says Don Moore, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. A 2012 study by Moore on overconfidence¹ was successfully replicated this year².

The team behind the new project says it plans to create discussion threads on PubPeer for about 2,400 replication studies in batches of about 100 at a time. Replication studies are indexed in the FORRT Library of Replication and Replication Attempts (FLoRA), an initiative of the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT), which is a community-driven effort to teach researchers about open science and reproducibility.

FORRT launched a database in 2024 to improve catalog replication studies. But the database’s creators at the Münster Open Science Center in Germany say it’s still not easy to find replicated studies because they are typically not linked to the original studies in many databases.

“Replicas are generally less cited and less visible than original studies,” says Josefina Weinerova, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London, who co-leads the PubPeer project.

Of the approximately 2,400 studies currently cataloged, almost 1,000 have been successfully replicated independently and 865 replication attempts failed. In the rest, the researchers managed to replicate some of the results.

Weinerova and her colleagues plan to inform the authors of all articles for which they have created threads on PubPeer. Weinerova says her team has already contacted the authors of the first batch of studies. Most did not respond, he says, and of those who did, none asked that the comments not be published.

Because PubPeer is often used to flag potential problems or errors in articles, some researchers have complained that their articles are mentioned on PubPeer when no errors have been found.

But Weinerova says researchers should be happy if studies confirming the validity of their work are featured prominently on PubPeer. “Successful replication is still useful for other authors to know about,” he says. “While there can be a perceived stigma in comments on PubPeer, there are also many comments that are not necessarily aimed at pointing out major problems with the articles.”