If knowing the truth about some result is important to you, don’t just take someone’s word for it. Don’t leave it up to the rest of the world to do this work; we’re all bunglers, you should know that. If you can, you should try it for yourself.

Something that you personally can replicate is replication. Watching someone else do it is also pretty close, since you still get to see it for yourself. Something that a big lab would be able to replicate is not really replication. It’s nice to have confirmation from a second lab, but now you’re just taking two people’s word for it instead of one... See more

The general understanding of replication is slightly less extreme. To most researchers, replication is when one group of scientists at a major university reproduce the work of another group of scientists at a different major university. There’s also a minority position that replications should be done by many labs, that replication is an internal... See more