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bonoboTPyesterday at 9:19 PM1 replyview on HN

Prerequisite required by who, and why is that entity motivated to design such a requirement? Universities also want more novel breakthrough papers to boast about and to outshine other universities in the rankings. And if one is honest, other researchers also get more excited about new ideas than a failed replication that may for a thousand different reasons and the original authors will argue you did something wrong, or evaluated in an unfair way, and generally publicly accusing other researchers of doing bad work won't help your career much. It's a small world, you'd be making enemies with people who will sit on your funding evaluation committees, hiring committees and it just generally leads to drama. Also papers are superseded so fast that people don't even care that a no longer state of the art paper may have been wrong. There are 5 newer ones that perform better and nobody uses the old one. I'm just stating how things actually are, I don't say that this is good, but when you say something "should" happen, think about who exactly is motivated to drive such a change.


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derektankyesterday at 10:19 PM

> Prerequisite required by who, and why is that entity motivated to design such a requirement?

Grant awarding institutions like the NIH and NSF presumably? The NSF has as one of its functions, “to develop and encourage the pursuit of a national policy for the promotion of basic research and education in the sciences”. Encouraging the replication of research as part of graduate degree curricula seems to fall within bounds. And the government’s interest in science isn’t novelty per se, it’s the creation and dissemination of factually correct information that can be useful to its constituents.

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