On the need for Research Replication in Social Computing A call
for replicating Social Computing results as a necessary step in
the maturity of the field. The field of Social Computing is a
rather new one but it is one of the more active in Computer
Science in the last few years. Many new conferences have been
created to host the research efforts of computer scientists,
social scientists, physicists, statisticians and many other
researchers and practitioners. The excitement generated by the
opportunities that opened through the relatively ease of
retrieving large amounts of data has led many young researchers
in diving to uncover the modes of social interactions. At the
risk of oversimplifying, one could say that the research papers
we produce follow the general pattern of observational sciences:
- We collect data that arguably can capture the phenomenon we
want to study, - we may apply some sophisticated statistical
tools, test a hypothesis applying machine learning tools, and -
analyze the results. Our conc