Replication is a vital part of the scientific process, and allows us to determine whether the work we are doing is cumulative and self-correcting. The term cumulative refers to the idea that as time goes by, earlier work should serve as a foundation to be built upon and allow us to construct theory. Self-correction in science refers to the long-run convergence toward the true nature of our object of study. 

The replication crisis suggests that a significant proportion of the body of work in many fields does not replicate. 

In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration carried out an ambitious project: to determine what proportion of the most influential studies in psychology would replicate in (close to) exact replication studies. To do so, they recruited a team of 270 scientists. The results showed that only 36% of studies replicated.

There are many factors that have been proposed to underlie the replication crisis. 

These include, but are not limited to: cognitive bias (Nickerson, 1988), multiple analytical pipelines in the research process (Coretta et al. 2023), statistical power (Button et al., 2013), and the incentive structure of the academy (Munafò et al., 2017). 

The Second Workshop on Replication in the Language Sciences (WoReLa 2) focuses on building cumulative knowledge in linguistics through reproducible, robust, and replicable research findings. 

For WoReLa 2, we particularly encourage submissions dealing with replication in experimental and corpus linguistics, for instance reflecting on the state of replicability and obstacles to the adoption of Open Science practices in the respective fields, reporting on concrete tools and workflows that help researchers in the language sciences make their research process more transparent, or bringing together converging evidence from different teams.