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Disentangling Reputation from Replication

With increasing attention paid to reproducibility in science, a natural worry for researchers  is, “What happens if my finding does not replicate?” With this question, Charles Ebersole, Jordan Axt, and Brian Nosek open their new article on perceptions of noveltyand reproducibility, published today in PLoS Biology . There are several ways to interpret this question, but Ebersole and colleagues are most concerned with reputational issues. In an ideal world, they note, reputations shouldn’t matter; the focus should be on the findings. But reality is different: findings are treated as possessions . Ebersole and his co-authors draw a contrast between innovation and reproducibility in evaluating reputations. Drawing this contrast is not without precedent. Some years back, I served on the National Science Foundation program Perception, Action, and Cognition. We were told that innovation was to be an overriding criterion in evaluating proposals. Up to that point, as I understood