Abstract
Replication is, often, seen as a mere repetition of a published study, which conflicts with the aim of novelty, and is therefore dismissed as a way to allocate our resources. Even so, it is important to realize the necessity of the act of replication in the scientific process. In fact, there is large agreement amongst the academic community that replication is the only single way in which a collection of individual studies become a critical mass of robust knowledge. This chapter presents an overview of the current debate on replication studies addressing some of the forces in the current Behavioural Accounting Research landscape that provide incentives against conducting replication studies and exploring how replication may be particularly important in an applied field like accounting where we aspire to both research and practice. The chapter closes by demonstrating that the object of replication can be all parts of a study from research question to statistical analyses to drawing conclusions.
This chapter presents the debate on replication studies addressing some of the forces in the Behavioural Accounting Research landscape that provide incentives against conducting replication studies and exploring how replication may be particularly important in an applied field like accounting where we aspire to both research and practice. Whereas robustness of findings is best served by continuous replication, the quest for novelty in the competitive international research arena at the same time seems to come at a cost to validity and reliability of studies. Consistent replication of findings, and trying to break the publication and reputation biases continue to be of great importance. Replication is, often, seen as a mere repetition of a published study, which conflicts with the aim of novelty, and is therefore dismissed as a way to allocate our resources. Studies on journals' publication policies, across the whole domain of science, consistently show the existence of biases towards publishing such 'positive studies'.
