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Is this somehow a flow on effect of more commonly cited papers having more reproduction attempts?


No, a moderately successful paper has 1-10 k citations, and usually 0-1 reproductions. Extremely successful papers have 10-40 k citations and 1-3 reproductions. They largely dont matter at all.

Its mostly because extraordinary claims receive more attention, and thus is found by the group for whom the result supported their prior beliefs. They will use it whenever they need to support such. This is also why such studies tend to keep getting cited as evidence long after a long line of failures to replicate have been published. As the result is non-replicable, there also wont be a newer, improved version of the publication, meaning all cites go to the original.


The theory is that there is a pressure in certain academic fields to reinforce existing popular narratives with new publications, motivating researchers to confirm them, and thus for other researchers to cite them. ...but since such efforts attract low-quality researchers and are based on an implicit initial bias, due to its self-referential nature, that the results are not reproducible by others in the future since teams that try to reproduce results are usually more neutral on the topics.




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