It was one of last year's most astonishing scientific stories: a leading psychology journal accepted a paper presenting evidence for precognition – an ability to perceive future events. What's more, mainstream psychologists had pored over a preprint of the paper and found no fatal flaw.
Bold scientific claims need to be replicated before gaining widespread acceptance, however, and now the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which published the paper in its March 2011 issue, has touched off controversy by rejecting the first attempts to repeat the work without sending them out for peer review.
The incident exposes a problem that may be biasing the entire body of psychological literature, argues Richard Wiseman
of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, one of the authors of a manuscript that describes three failed attempts to repeat an experiment in the original paper. If failed replications languish unpublished, he says, "you don't know whether the effects that are published are genuine. It's a problem in psychology, and it's a particular problem in parapsychology."