Initiative by the University of Chicago: “Papers have been the de facto unit of knowledge in science. But science is not static and a paper is not meant to be the final destination, especially in empirical research. A paper may propose a novel way to look at the world and offer a snapshot of what it finds. That snapshot is far from the whole story.
The world keeps changing after a paper is published. New data, new models, and new methods give us a chance to return to its questions: does the pattern persist, does the effect size remain the same, and what has changed? As AI agents become more capable, we have an opportunity to make revisiting important work a routine part of science.
Today, we are introducing Living Science, a project to keep influential research alive by revisiting its findings as new data, models, and methods become available. We are starting with economics, focusing on studies whose data sources are regularly updated. The goal is to not assess whether the paper was correct at the time of publishing but to provide resources and venues for continued discussions of influential research.
We use SAI’s replication agent to attempt to reproduce each paper’s key findings, documenting what matches and what does not, before extending the analysis to newer data where possible. The AI agent will first look for public replication packages if available and then identify relevant data sources for extending the analysis. As a result, we may not use exactly the same dataset and setup. The exercise is closer to writing a follow-up paper than strict replication. We sanity-check the results and reach out to the original authors for feedback. We also invite the community to identify issues and post comments, helping us improve the analyses over time…(More)”.
