Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences

Citation

Miske O, Abatayo AL, Daley M, Dirzo M, Fox N, Haber N, Hahn KM, Kline Struhl M, Mawhinney B, Silverstein P, Stankov T, Tyner AH, Adamkovič M, Alzahawi S & Reader AT (2026) Investigating the reproducibility of the social and behavioural sciences. Nature, 652, pp. 126-134. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10203-5

Abstract
Published claims should be reproducible, yielding the same result when the same analysis is applied to the same data. Here we assess reproducibility in a stratified random sample of 600 papers published from 2009 to 2018 in 62 journals spanning the social and behavioural sciences. The authors of 144 (24.0%, 95% confidence interval (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 out 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 (73.5%, 95% CI = 66.4–80.0%) were rated as at least approximately reproducible (within 15% of the original effects or within 0.05 of original P values) after inverse weighting each of the 551 claims by the number of claims per paper. We observed higher reproducibility for papers from political science and economics compared with other fields, for more recent papers compared with older papers and for papers from journals that require data sharing. Implementation of measures to verify that research is reproducible is needed to support trustworthiness in the complex enterprise of knowledge production.

Notes
Additional authors: Saule Anafinova, Eli Awtrey, Erick Axxe, James Bailey, Bert N. Bakker, Akshaya Balaji, Gabriel Banik, František Bartoš, Henk Berkman, Zachariah Berry, Felix S. Bethke, Timothy F. Brady, Nate Breznau, Sara Capitan, Tabaré Capitán, Laura Caquelin, Kent Jason Cheng, William J. Chopik, Gwen-Jiro Clochard, Tom Coupé, Jamie Cummins, Elif Gizem Demirag Burak, Jianhua Duan, Kevin M. Esterling, Thomas R. Evans, Nathan Fiala, James Field, Victor Gay, Jing Geng, Johanna Gereke, Ilka Helene Gleibs, Amélie Gourdon-Kanhukamwe, Dmitry Grigoryev, Nicholas Gunby, Paul H. P. Hanel, Sanghyun Hong, Sean Dae Houlihan, Nick Huntington-Klein, Kamil Izydorczak, Kristin Jankowsky, Kai Jonas, Pavol Kačmár, Hansika Kapoor, Sebastian Karcher, Marta Kołczyńska, David Kretschmer, Ljiljana Lazarevic, Katelin E. Leahy, Jessica C. Lee, Christopher Limnios, An-Chiao Liu, John Wills Lloyd, Ruben Lopez-Nicolas, Nigel Mantou Lou, Richard E. Lucas, Maximilian Maier, Daniel J. Mallinson, Marcel Martončik, Michael C. McCall, Nikita Mehta, Esteban Méndez, Johannes Michalak, Daniel C. Molden, Faisal Mushtaq, Claudia Neuendorf, Austin Lee Nichols, Gustav Nilsonne, Ernest O’Boyle, Jeewon Oh, Thomas Ostermann, Abiola Oyebanjo, Radoslaw Panczak, Yuri G. Pavlov, Zoran Pavlović, Noemi Peter, Kim Peters, Nathaniel D. Porter, Mariah Purol, Arathy Puthillam, Marco Ramljak, W. Robert Reed, Jan Philipp Röer, Ivan Ropovik, Alexander O. Savi, Kathleen Schmidt, Landon Schnabel, Eric L. Sevigny, Samuel Shaki, Shishir Shakya, Andrew Soh, Angela Somo, Fatih Sonmez, Eirik Strømland, Jordan W. Suchow, Anna Szabelska, Anirudh Tagat, Melba Verra Tutor, Karolina Urbanska, Pieter Van Dessel, Elisabeth Julie Vargo, Diem Thi Hong Vo, Victor Volkman, Ke Wang, Aaron L. Wichman, Jamal R. Williams, Fabian Winter, Ferdinand Wintermantel, Nan Zhang, Ignazio Ziano, Cristina Zogmaister, Zorana Zupan, Brian A. Nosek & Timothy M. Errington