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Sociologist [[Stephen Cole (sociologist)|Stephen Cole]] conducted a number of empirical studies attempting to find evidence for a hierarchy of scientific disciplines, and was unable to find significant differences in terms of core of knowledge, degree of codification, or research material. Differences that he did find evidence for included a tendency for textbooks in soft sciences to rely on more recent work, while the material in textbooks from the hard sciences was more consistent over time.<ref name="Cole 1983"/> However, it has been suggested that Cole might have missed some relationships in the data because he studied individual measurements, without accounting for the way multiple measurements could trend in the same direction, and because not all the criteria that could indicate a discipline's scientific status were analysed.<ref name="Simonton 2004">{{cite journal| author=Simonton DK| title=Psychology's Status as a Scientific Discipline: Its Empirical Placement Within an Implicit Hierarchy of the Sciences. | journal=Review of General Psychology | year= 2004 | volume= 8 | issue= 1 | pages= 59–67 | doi=10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.59| s2cid=145134072 }}</ref>
Cleveland 1984 performed a survey of 57 journals and found that natural science journals used many more graphs than journals in mathematics or social science, and that social science journals often presented large amounts of observational data in the absence of graphs. The amount of page area used for graphs ranged from 0% to 31%, and the variation was primarily due to the number of graphs included rather than their sizes.<ref name="Cleveland1984">{{cite journal| author=Cleveland WS| title=Graphs in Scientific Publications | journal=The American Statistician| year= 1984 | volume= 38 | issue= 4 | pages= 261–269 | doi=10.2307/2683400 | jstor= 2683400}}</ref> Further analyses by Smith in 2000,<ref name="Smith2000"/> based on samples of graphs from journals in seven major scientific disciplines, found that the amount of graph usage correlated "almost perfectly" with hardness (r=0.97). They also suggested that the hierarchy applies
Fanelli 2010 proposed that we expect more positive outcomes in "softer" sciences because there are fewer constraints on researcher bias. They found that among research papers that tested a hypothesis, the frequency of positive results was predicted by the perceived hardness of the field. For example, the social sciences as a whole had a 2.3-fold increased odds of positive results compared to the physical sciences, with the biological sciences in between. They added that this supported the idea that the social sciences and natural sciences differ only in degree, as long as the social sciences follow the scientific approach.<ref name="Fanelli2010">{{cite journal| author=Fanelli D| title="Positive" results increase down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. | journal=PLOS ONE | year= 2010 | volume= 5 | issue= 4 | pages= e10068 | doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0010068 | pmc=2850928 | pmid= 20383332}}</ref>
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