The more media coverage that an academic paper gets, the less likely its findings are to be successfully replicated, according to a study focused on psychology scholarship.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 January, says that ideally “media should cover credible and rigorous research. Yet in reality, the mainstream media tends to highlight research that finds surprising, counterintuitive results.”
“Media attention and replication success are negatively correlated,” it concludes.
Building on smaller, previous studies that found that more surprising findings were less likely to replicate, the research examined more than 14,000 psychology papers, covering nearly every paper published over the past 20 years across six subfields in six top-tier journals.
