Is once enough? on the extent and content of replications in human-computer interaction

TY - GEN

T1 - Is once enough?

T2 - SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014

AU - Hornbæk, Kasper

AU - Sander, Søren S.

AU - Bargas-Avila, Javier Andrés

AU - Simonsen, Jakob Grue

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - A replication is an attempt to confirm an earlier study's findings. It is often claimed that research in Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) contains too few replications. To investigate this claim we examined four publication outlets (891 papers) and found 3% attempting replication of an earlier result. The replications typically confirmed earlier findings, but treated replication as a confirm/not-confirm decision, rarely analyzing effect sizes or comparing in depth to the replicated paper. When asked, most authors agreed that their studies were replications, but rarely planned them as such. Many non-replication studies could have corroborated earlier work if they had analyzed data differently or used minimal effort to collect extra data. We discuss what these results mean to HCI, including how reporting of studies could be improved and how conferences/journals may change author instructions to get more replications.

AB - A replication is an attempt to confirm an earlier study's findings. It is often claimed that research in Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) contains too few replications. To investigate this claim we examined four publication outlets (891 papers) and found 3% attempting replication of an earlier result. The replications typically confirmed earlier findings, but treated replication as a confirm/not-confirm decision, rarely analyzing effect sizes or comparing in depth to the replicated paper. When asked, most authors agreed that their studies were replications, but rarely planned them as such. Many non-replication studies could have corroborated earlier work if they had analyzed data differently or used minimal effort to collect extra data. We discuss what these results mean to HCI, including how reporting of studies could be improved and how conferences/journals may change author instructions to get more replications.

KW - replications

U2 - 10.1145/2556288.2557004

DO - 10.1145/2556288.2557004

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-2473-1

SP - 3523

EP - 3532

BT - Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

Y2 - 26 April 2014 through 1 May 2014

ER -