Word.ws English Dictionary

replication crisis

replication crisis noun: a crisis caused by the problem that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce, casting doubt on the meaningfulness of their results in light of the requirements of the scientific method.

Noun

replication crisis (plural replication crises)

  1. A crisis caused by the problem that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce, casting doubt on the meaningfulness of their results in light of the requirements of the scientific method.
    • It is not just the social sciences that are in the grip of replication crises.2015 November 2, Andreas Ortmann, “The replication crisis has engulfed economics”, in The Conversation, retrieved 02 Sep 2021
    • In any crisis, there are the people who ask 'Crisis? What crisis?' Psychology's replication crisis is no exception. Almost as soon as the Open Science Collaboration published the results of its reproducibility project, there were critics who complained that the work itself was an example of...2018, Brian M. Hughes, Psychology in Crisis, page 24

Proper noun

the replication crisis

  1. All replication crises, in all scientific fields or specialties, viewed collectively as a unitary, single epistemic crisis.
    • Even Arturo Casadevall, an American microbiologist who has published extensively on the rate, distribution, and detection of fraud in science, told me that despite his personal interest in the topic, my time would be better served investigating the broader issues driving the replication crisis.2017 February 1, Stephen Buranyi, “The high-tech war on science fraud”, in The Guardian

Examples of replication crisis in a sentence

  • What crisis?' Psychology's replication crisis is no exception.2018, Brian M. Hughes, Psychology in Crisis, page 24:
  • One simple (albeit partial) solution to the “replication crisis” is to conduct studies that use samples large enough to produce good estimates of the associations of interest.2019, Ross D. Parke, Glenn I. Roisman, Amanda J. Rose, Social Development, page 59:
  • They argue that the larger part of the replication crisis is the lack of a cumulative theoretical framework: […]2020, Vincenzo F. DiNicola, Drozdstoj Stoyanov, Psychiatry in Crisis, page 141:
  • AI is wrestling with a replication crisis.2020 November 12, Will Douglas Heaven, “AI is wrestling with a replication crisis”, in MIT Technology Review, retrieved 02 Sep 2021:

Forms of replication crisis

pluralreplication crises

Origin of replication crisis

Coined in the early 2010s with growing awareness of the problem.

Questions about replication crisis

What does replication crisis mean?
Replication crisis means a crisis caused by the problem that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce, casting doubt on the meaningfulness of their results in light of the requirements of the scientific method.
How do you use replication crisis in a sentence?
What crisis?' Psychology's replication crisis is no exception.
What part of speech is replication crisis?
Replication crisis can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of replication crisis?
The plural of replication crisis is replication crises.

Words near replication crisis in the dictionary

  1. replicated workers
  2. replicates
  3. replicating
  4. replication
  5. replication crises
  6. replication crisis
  7. replication fork
  8. replication forks
  9. replicational
  10. replicationally
  11. replications

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: replication crisis (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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