Science’s moral economy of repair: Replication and the circulation of reference

Responding to the so-called reproducibility crisis, various disciplines have proposed–and some have implemented–changes in research practices and policies. These changes have been aligned with a restricted and rather uniform conceptualization of what science is, and knowledge is made. However, knowledge-making is not a uniform affair. Here, we reflect on a salient fault line running through Wissenschaft (the whole of academic knowledge making, spanning the sciences and humanities), grounded in the relationship between the acts of research and writing, separating research as reporting from research as writing. We do so to demonstrate that replication and replicability cannot be treated as uniformly applicable and that assessment and improvement of research quality invites various tools and strategies. Among those, replication is important, but not omnipresent. Considering these other tools and strategies in context allows us to situate the value of replication for knowledge making as a whole.