As this rather striking example demonstrates, the widespread failure to adhere to the replication standard poses serious problems for any discipline. At a minimum, some protection should be afforded to keep researchers from wasting their time reading these works. At worst, vastly more time can be wasted in ultimately fruitless efforts to expand, extend, and build on a body of work that has no empirical foundation. More generally, the replication standard enables scholars to understand and evaluate existing research, and select more discriminatingly among this body of work in developing their own research agendas. Without complete information about where data come from and how we measured the real world and abstracted from it, we cannot truly understand a set of empirical results.
Evaluation likewise requires at least as much information.
Thus, reviewers and journal and book editors should be privy to sufficient information to replicate work submitted to them for publication. Perhaps most importantly, the replication standard is extremely important to the further development of the discipline. This procedure ensures that the second researcher will receive all the benefits of the first researcher's hard work. Such contributions are considerably more valuable when the cost of building thereon is as small as possible. Reproducing and then extending high-quality existing research is also an extremely useful pedagogical tool, albeit one that political science students have been able to exploit only infrequently given the discipline's limited adherence to the replication standard.