Abstract:

An academic scientist’s professional success depends on publishing.

Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results.

These incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation.  I will briefly review the evidence and challenges for reproducibility and then discuss some of the initiatives that aim to nudge incentives and create infrastructure that can improve reproducibility and accelerate scientific progress.

Biography:

Brian Nosek is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia and is co-founder of both the Center for Open Science and Project Implicit.

This talk is part of the Brains, Minds and Machines Seminar Series September 2015-June 2016