SCIENCE works for two reasons. First, its results are based on experiments: extracting Mother Nature’s secrets by asking her directly, rather than by armchair philosophising. And a culture of openness and replication means that scientists are policed by their peers. Scientific papers include sections on methods so that others can repeat the experiments and check that they reach the same conclusions.

That, at least, is the theory. In practice, checking old results is much less good for a scientist’s career than publishing exciting new ones. Without such checks, dodgy results sneak into the literature. In recent years medicine, psychology and genetics have all been put under the microscope and found wanting. One analysis of 100 psychology papers, published last year, for instance, was able to replicate only 36% of their findings. And a study conducted in 2012 by Amgen, an American pharmaceutical company, could replicate only 11% of the 53 papers it reviewed.

Now it is the turn of economics. Although that august discipline was founded in the 18th century by Adam Smith (pictured above) and his contemporaries, it is only over the past few decades that its practitioners (some of them, anyway) have come to the conclusions that the natural sciences reached centuries ago: that experiments might be the best way to test their theories about how the world works. A rash of results in “microeconomics”—which studies the behaviour of individuals—has suggested that Homo sapiens is not always Homo economicus, the paragon of cold-blooded rationality assumed by many formal economic models.

But as economics adopts the experimental procedures of the natural sciences, it might also suffer from their drawbacks. In a paper just published in Science, Colin Camerer of the California Institute of Technology and a group of colleagues from universities around the world decided to check. They repeated 18 laboratory experiments in economics whose results had been published in the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics between 2011 and 2014.

For 11 of the 18 papers (ie, 61% of them) Dr Camerer and his colleagues found a broadly similar effect to whatever the original authors had reported. That is below the 92% replication rate they would have expected had all the original studies been as statistically robust as the authors claimed—but by the standards of medicine, psychology and genetics it is still impressive.

One theory put forward by Dr Camerer and his colleagues to explain this superior hit rate is that economics may still benefit from the zeal of the newly converted. They point out that, when the field was in its infancy, experimental economists were keen that others should adopt their methods. To that end, they persuaded economics journals to devote far more space to printing information about methods, including explicit instructions and raw data sets, than sciences journals normally would.

This, the researchers reckon, may have helped establish a culture of unusual rigour and openness. Whatever the cause, it does suggest one thing. Natural scientists may have to stop sneering at their economist brethren, and recognise that the dismal science is, indeed, a science after all.