Replications and reproductions are main tools of scientific research. They adhere to the scientific principle that research needs to be intersubjective. That is, if two studies are conducted exactly the same way, their findings should match.

Differences between replications and reproductions are subtle but important in that replications describe the repetition of a study's design and method by another scholar using new data whereas reproductions describe the redoing of an original study's analysis through its original data. The respective field of meta science (or, the science of sciences) has also brought forward more detailled distinctions, separating direct from conceptual replications and computational from recreate reproductions.

Obviously, there are a lot of determinators that may prevent such matching findings. For example, news consumption today is drastically different from news consumption some twenty years ago. Hence, studies replicating prior studies are, surprisingly often, doomed to fail (see, for example, McEwan, Carpenter, & Westermann, 2018). However, they are not only failing because of changing circumstances but potentially due to a wide array of reasons, human error also being one of them. In fact Artner and colleagues (2021) showed from a series of reproductions that it is often copy-and-paste errors or rounding mistakes that inhibit successful reproductions.

Several other problems could occur when trying to reproduce or replicate studies. For example, original data could be unavailable (e.g., due to legal reasons) or the recollection of data could be impossible (e.g., because it studied a now-offline platform) for a replication. Also, sometimes effort put into an original study simply is too much to handle for a reproduction/replication. In any case, reproductions and replications are crucial yet have been largely ignored in communication science so far (Breuer & Haim, 2024; Dienlin et al., 2021).

This platform is to display efforts to reproduce and replicate studies in communication science, not least by students. We believe that students are well-capable of either reproducing or replicating studies in communication science, thus not learning a lot from these endeavors but also conributing to science's overarching rigor and, ultimately, credibility.

If you are interested, for example for your Bachelor or Master thesis, please contact us.

References

• Artner, R., Verliefde, T., Steegen, S., ..., & Vanpaemel, W. (2021). The reproducibility of statistical results in psychological research: An investigation using unpublished raw data. Psychological Methods, 26(5), 527–546. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000365
• Breuer, J., & Haim, M. (2024). Are we replicating yet? Reproduction and replication in communication research. Media and Communication, 12, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8382
• Dienlin, T., Johannes, N., Bowman, N.D., ..., de Vreese, C. (2021). An agenda for open science in communication. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqz052
• McEwan, B., Carpenter, C.J., Westerman, D. (2018). On replication in Communication Science. Communication Studies, 69(3), 235–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2018.1464938