The replication they are talking about in these particular pharma studies are of the nature that a pharma corp orders up twelve identical 8 person studies. Three studies come back showing their new pill helped a tiny bit, six show no the pill did nothing, and three show the patients got worse. They then cherry pick the three that showed it helped, and possibly toss in one of the ones that showed the pill did nothing just to cover up what they are doing. They then publish a paper showing that 3 out of 4 studies validated that the pills work. The other 8 studies are set on fire and never mentioned. And there is your multiple studies.
This is not some crazed conspiracy theory either, this (doing multiple very small sample size studies rather than one slightly larger study and discarding and never mentioning some of the studies with the least favorable results) is actually how it is now known to be done, and this methodology is the reason why some journals have started to say that all of the studies have to be registered in advance if they want to publish their results so that the companies can't selectively discard results like they have been doing.
This is not some crazed conspiracy theory either, this (doing multiple very small sample size studies rather than one slightly larger study and discarding and never mentioning some of the studies with the least favorable results) is actually how it is now known to be done, and this methodology is the reason why some journals have started to say that all of the studies have to be registered in advance if they want to publish their results so that the companies can't selectively discard results like they have been doing.