A research team replicated about 100 older psychology studies’ experiments to see how many times they would get the same results. The team found that less than half of the experiments could produce the original results.

Researchers of the new study confirmed the findings and said the result doesn’t mean all the unconfirmed studies were wrong. It just suggested that a single study cannot provides definitive answers and why researchers after every study say ‘there is need of more research’, the researchers said.

Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and lead researcher of the new study, said there are very few chances that a study is 100% correct. The new study has shown that a study’s results cannot be considered as the last word, Nosek added.

“Each individual study has some evidence. It contributes some information toward a conclusion. But the real conclusion, when you can say confidently that something is true or false, is based on an accumulation of evidence over many studies”, Nosek said.

The professor said even the new study’s results cannot be taken as a definitive word about reproducibility. The study, released Thursday by the journalScience, was conducted by an international team of over 300 researchers. Organizers focused the study on psychology as they were from the same field. To replicate the experiments, the researchers worked with authors of the original studies.

According to the researchers, approximately 40% experiments produced the original results.