Is Once Enough? On the Extent and Content of Replications in Human-Computer Interaction
Venue
CHI '14 Proceedings of the 2014 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, pp. 3523-3532
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Kasper Hornbæk, Søren S. Sander, Javier Bargas-Avila, Jakob Grue Simonsen
BibTeX
Abstract
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.
