Our Mission

Transparent Replications by Clearer Thinking seeks to celebrate high quality social science and psychological research while shifting incentives toward more replicable, reliable methods.

We accomplish this by conducting rapid replications of recently published psychology and human behavior studies in prominent academic journals with the aims of:

• Celebrating the use of best practices — We incentivize and reward the use of best practices by highlighting transparency in research, including pre-registration of research designs and accessibility of study materials, data and analysis code.
• Improving reliability — Unlike other replication efforts, our project focuses on the replication of recently published studies in top journals shortly after they are published in order to give researchers and the scientific community quick feedback on the reliability of important new results.
• Promoting clarity — We reward clear communication of scientific results to encourage scientists to present their work in a manner less likely to be misinterpreted by the public and the press.

Currently, social scientists are faced with incentives encouraging novelty and counter-intuitiveness of results in order for their research to be selected for publication. However, these incentives can lead to research being less reliable and replicable. We aim to shift those incentives by creating an expectation among researchers and journals that an independent replication attempt will be made on a substantial fraction of studies shortly after publication. By making replication attempts much more common, we encourage the publication of robust and reliable findings and the use of best practices. Additionally, we will promote and celebrate the high quality work that replicates successfully, further encouraging the use of reliable methods.

Learn more about us by reading about what we do, checking out the frequently asked questions or meeting the team.