This Study Was Hailed as a Win for Science Reform. Now It’s Being Retracted.

"At first, it looked like a paradigm of science done right. A group of behavioral scientists had repeated the same experiments over and over in separate labs, following the same rigorous methods, and found that 86 percent of their attempts had the results they expected.

In a field where the seemingly constant collapse of influential discoveries over the past decade has triggered a reproducibility crisis, this finding was welcome news. The study’s authors included heavy hitters in the science-reform movement, and it appeared in a top journal, Nature Human Behaviour, in November.

“The high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries,” concluded the paper, which has been cited more than 70 times, according to Google Scholar. “The reforms are working,” a press release declared, and a news story asked: “What reproducibility crisis?”

But now the paper has been retracted, following a monthslong journal investigation into concerns about how it had been designed and written. For starters, it claimed that every aspect of the project had been “preregistered,” referring to the increasingly popular practice of publicly describing plans for a study ahead of time...."