Reproducibility in scientific research has recently become a hot topic of immense importance to our community.
A team of scientists has selected a set of high-profile papers on cancer research with the aim of conducting an open reproducibility study.
Sasha Kamb, the head of research discovery at Amgen, states “We believe that interested scientists can look at our methods and results and draw their own conclusions.” Unfortunately, the Amgen researchers did not communicate with the Harvard group to resolve their discrepancies.
Most readers of the popular media, including the general public and our politicians who make funding decisions, hear that we have a rampant reproducibility crisis in academic research.
As a research community we have work to do-we need to continuously improve our ways of describing, standardizing, and sharing our methods and reagents, and we need to enable open discussion and responsible, rigorous publication of results, be they positive or negative.
How can scientists enhance rigor in conducting basic research and reporting research results? A white paper from the American Society for Cell Biology explores this and the economics of reproducibility in preclinical research. See the source article for more.
Source: On Reproducibility and Clocks
Originally published at Cogly.
