Commentary on Isager et al. (2021) Reflections on the Replication Value (RV) and a Proposal for Revision

To help researchers determine what studies to replicate, Isager et al. (2021, p.1) introduced the Replication Value (RV), “a proxy for expected utility gain”. In this commentary, we point out that there are scenarios where people can opt to replicate studies with a lower RV compared to those with a higher RV. Methodologically, we highlight that the differences in the RV become very small when comparing studies with different large (e.g., over 500) samples. To adjust for this, we demonstrate that a modification to the RV-equation – by log transforming the sample size – leads to a RV that discriminates between studies with large sample sizes with greater precision.