'Replication Crisis

The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis most severely affects the social sciences and medicine, while survey data strongly indicates that all of the natural sciences are probably implicated as well. The phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience. Because the reproducibility of experimental results is an essential part of the scientific method, an inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work.