Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences
Olivia Miske; Anna Lou Abatayo; Mason Daley; Mirka Dirzo; Nicholas William Fox; Noah Haber; Krystal M. Hahn; Melissa Kline Struhl · 2026 · Nature
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when applying the same analysis to the same data. We assessed reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. Authors of 144 (24.0% [95% CI 20.8 - 27.6%]) papers made data available to assess reproducibility, and for 38 others, we obtained source data to reconstruct the dataset. We assessed 143 of the 182 available datasets and found that 76.6 (53.6% [95% CI 45.8 - 60.7%]) papers were rated as precisely reproducible and 105.0 (73
Abstract by Olivia Miske; Anna Lou Abatayo; Mason Daley; Mirka Dirzo; Nicholas William Fox; Noah Haber; Krystal M. Hahn; Melissa Kline Struhl, Nature (2026) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5