Reproducibility, replicability, robustness, and generalizability in corpus linguistics

Establishing the credibility of scientific research involves several related but significantly different concerns. One potential problem in surveying different approaches to these concerns is that of terminology, as some of the basic terms used in the discussion — reproducibility, replicability, robustness, and generalizability — are often used in inconsistent or contradictory ways. This paper proposes to resolve such confusion by providing a terminological framework for discussing what kind of confirmation is necessary for a scientific study to be deemed credible. A study is said to be ‘reproducible’ if we can obtain identical results by performing an identical analysis on identical data, ‘replicable’ if we can obtain consistent results using the same analysis on different data, ‘robust’ if we can obtain consistent results from identical data using a different analysis, and ‘generalizable’ if we can obtain consistent results from different data using a different analysis.