Recent reports in neuroscience, especially those concerning brain-injury and neuroimaging, have revealed low reproducibility of results within the field and urged for more replication studies. However, it is unclear if the neuroscience journals welcome or discourage the submission of reports on replication studies. This article by Andy W.K. Yeung, therefore, assessed the explicit position of neuroscience journals on replications.
Of the 465 journals reviewed, 28 (6.0%) explicitly stated that they accept replications, 394 (84.7%) did not state their position on replications, 40 (8.6%) implicitly discouraged replications by emphasizing on the novelty of the manuscripts, and 3 (0.6%) explicitly stated that they reject replications. There was no significant difference in the proportions of journals explicitly welcomed
replications with respect to high or low impact factors.
The main aim of the study was to examine the information given by neuroscience journals regarding their position towards welcoming, discouraging or rejecting replication studies – to provide descriptive information on the current journal practices so that evidence-based recommendations to journal publishers can be made.
It is noteworthy that the majority of the neuroscience replication studies analyzed in this article (89.9%) were published in journals that did not explicitly accept replications (94.0% of surveyed journals). This is encouraging as it implies that researchers can actually consider submitting replication studies to journals that did not state their replication policy.