On the Need for a Replication Journal

There is very little replication of research in economics, particularly compared with other sciences. This paper argues that there is a dire need for studies that replicate research, that their scarcity is due to poor or negative rewards for replicators, and that this could be improved with a journal that exclusively publishes replication studies. I then discuss how such a journal could be organized, in particular in the face of some negative rewards some replication studies may elicit. This work benefitted from discussions with the participants of the Workshop “The Future of Scholarly Communication” at the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Hamburg. Comments from Graham A. Davis, Jan Höffler, Zacharias Maniadis, B.D. McCullough, Dan Newlon, Robert Reed are also ackowledged. Email: [email protected]. The views expressed are those of individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Federal Reserve System, or the Board of Governors.