Repetition vs. Replication

A basic principle for scientific research is that the experiment must be able to be replicated. What happens when an experiment is replicated?

• A scientist publisher accepts the experimental results for printing.

• No one in the scientific community agrees with the methods or results.

• Other scientists perform the same experiment and get comparable results

• The scientific researcher preforms the experiment many times and gets the same results.

The scientific community communicates its finding to the rest of the world by publishing its work in scientific journals. This enables others to replicate and repeat other scientists’ experiments to accept or reject the hypothesis and conclusions of others. However, individual scientists do not submit their work to the scientific community before making sure they are right. How best can they ensure that their results are valid?

• Scientists hire editors to review their lab reports to make sure that their explanations are clear and concise and to change anything that doesn’t sound good.

• Scientists partner with mathematicians to check over all their data and charts and graphs to ensure that there is enough data, but if not, they can add to the data.

• Scientists repeat their experiments just a few times to show that they can get the same results more than once and to catch any mistakes in the procedure.

• The scientists repeat their experiments over and over many times to ensure that they have taken everything into consideration to communicate quality results.

Results in science are not generally accepted as being accurate until they can be verified. Which of the following is an example of repetition in science?

• A student designs an experiment on plant growth that includes multiple trials.

• One scientist carries out the same experiment performed by another scientist to validate the results.

• A scientist poses a new question for investigation after reading the results of another scientist’s work.

• A scientist analyzes the data included in the published work of another scientist and agrees with the conclusions

Scientists repeat scientific studies to validate results

• True

• False