Towards a Greater Diversity of Replication Studies

The replication of existing knowledge (e.g., previous study results) stands as an essential research practice across all science disciplines. Despite the importance of replication, the scarcity of replication studies is commonly criticized in business, management, and information system (IS) research. Therefore, efforts have already been made to facilitate replication research in the IS community, such as establishing conference tracks and journals focusing on publishing replication studies and providing guidelines on how and why to conduct replication research. Nonetheless, the perception of replication research remains unchanged, describing it as mundane. Therefore, in this issues and opinions article, we will explore how replication research could be made more appealing by diversifying the categories of replication studies. In this regard, we looked at replication in neuroscience, eliciting two new replication study categories: ‘transfer’ and ‘method.’ Additionally, through extensive discussion with other IS scholars, we added one more replication category, ‘comparison.’ We hope that this diversification will attract more researchers and also show the potential replication research holds.