Abstract

How should we measure the quality of experimental research? With talk of a looming “replicability crisis”, this question has gained additional significance. Yet, common measures of research quality based on reliability and validity do not always track core epistemic virtues. To remedy this issue, we draw on information theory and propose a measure of research quality based on mutual information. Mutual information measures how much information an experimental method carries about the world. We show that this measure tracks epistemic virtues that reliability and validity do not. We conclude by discussing implications of this information-theoretic measure of research quality and address some limitations of this approach.