• What an Amazing SIG today! Read summary
• If you want to stay involved, contact Max
• Follow the conversation with the #replichi hashtag.

RepliCHI is an on-going discussion thread in the HCI Community about Replication of research and findings.

It began at CHI2011 as a Panel.

At CHI2012 it will be a SIG Meeting to discuss repliCHI2013

For CHI2013, we hope it will be an extended abstract publication venue

Replication of research is considered a corner stone of research in many scientific fields, yet it is not uncommon for research to be rejected in CHI for being ‘incremental’. Our community is novelty focused, and drives us to break new ground, with new methods, and produce significant and new findings.

In science, it is common for people to try and replicate discoveries, so that the community can confirm new discoveries. In HCI, would we ever repeat someone else’s study to confirm and validate the results? Or do we simply take the findings of a 30-participant user study performed at a single institution, as true?

The HCI community often thinks more like art, where new work is inspired by prior work but breaks new ground. And for much of our community, art and design is a key factor.

So – how in our community should we support replication in some form? Should we support replication at all? Do we support replication already?

The panel at CHI2011 brought together various perspectives, including a Technical Program chair for CHI2012 and the CHI2013 Conference chair, to discuss how our community might support, facilitate, or reward replication, in some form, in the future of CHI. At CHI2012, we are running a SIG Meeting for interested people to actively plan for the future, because from CHI2013, we hope RepliCHI will be a new extended abstracts publication venue at CHI. RepliCHI will accept submissions of replicated studies, whether they confirm or challenge previous findings. Together we can take the long research view – that no single study can be taken as ground truth in isolation.

This website provides resources to talk and share about replication in HCI. There’s a wiki for discussion (if anyone wants it) and a place for links and resources about replicability of research.

Read our CHI2012 Extended Abstract Preprint to find out more.