Abstract
Most discussions of the reproducibility crisis focus on its epistemic aspect: the fact that the scientific community fails to follow some norms of scientific investigation, which leads to high rates of irreproducibility via a high rate of false positive findings. The purpose of this paper is to argue that there is a heretofore underappreciated and understudied dimension to the reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience that may prove to be at least as important as the epistemic dimension. This is the communication dimension. The link between communication and reproducibility is immediate: independent investigators would not be able to recreate an experiment whose design or implementation were inadequately described. I exploit evidence of a replicability and reproducibility crisis in computational science, as well as research into quality of reporting to support the claim that a widespread failure to adhere to reporting standards, especially the norm of descriptive completeness, is an important contributing factor in the current reproducibility crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience.
Highlights
The reproducibility crisis is usually depicted as resulting from a failure to follow some norms of scientific investigation
If my analysis is correct the reproducibility crisis experienced by experimental psychology and neuroscience stems from two sources
The researchers are violating the norms of scientific investigation, which leads to an increase in false positives, which in turn leads to failed replication attempts
Summary
The reproducibility crisis is usually depicted as resulting from a failure to follow some norms of scientific investigation (but see, e.g., Bird 2018). If sufficiently widespread, this failure can cause a proliferation of false positive findings in the literature, which. This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Philosophical Perspectives on the Replicability Crisis Guest Editors: Mattia Andreoletti, Jan Sprenger
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