Hi, I'm Ira Plato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

How do we know what we know? That's where science comes in. It gives us a method for testing our

assumptions and getting trustworthy results. And that's really the definition of research.

First you search with an initial study, then you research with follow-up studies to confirm.

But some researchers have warned that many scientific studies cannot be replicated.

This is what's called the replication crisis.

To find out how deep the problem goes, the U.S. Defense Department Research Projects

Agency, you know that is DARPA, funded one of the largest analyses of social science called

the Score Project. With the help of hundreds of researchers, they checked the results of thousands

of papers across economics, education, and psychology.

And the results? Researchers could only replicate half the papers analyzed. Here to talk about

the project and give an update on how the scientific world is trying to change itself,

is Dr. Tim Errington, Senior Director of research at the Center for Open Science, one of the

leads on this project. Joining him is Dr. Abel Brodur, Professor of Economics at the University

of Ottawa, and founder of the Institute for Replication, who recently released the results of a

separate replication study. Welcome both of you to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for the invite. All right. Thank you for joining us. We have covered

replication on the show in the past. So what made this project different? And why was DARPA involved?

Yeah. So there's a couple aspects to that to describe. One reason that

DARPA was involved, and I can't speak on behalf of them, is that there were prior projects that

were reported having challenges in terms of having confidence in research, right? How much

confidence should we have in anything that's being published? I think the wrong way to do that is it's binary. It's published. It equals it's true. Not published means it's not true. So that's definitely not the case. And DARPA was paying attention to this. They use research. They use the social behavioral science research a lot. And they were trying to figure out methods to sort through that, to sort through

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