Paul Lodder Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder…

Nature - Grass-roots action against bad behaviour has spurred reform — and should keep going.

Nature - Missing documentation and obsolete environments force participants in the Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge to get creative.

A reproducibility crisis is a situation where many scientific studies cannot be reproduced. Inappropriate practices of science, such as HARKing, p-hacking, and selective reporting of positive results, have been suggested as causes of irreproducibility. In this editorial, I propose that a lack of raw data or data fabrication is another possible cause of irreproducibility.As an Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain, I have handled 180 manuscripts since early 2017 and have made 41 editorial decisions categorized as “Revise before review,” requesting that the authors provide raw data. Surprisingly, among those 41 manuscripts, 21 were withdrawn without providing raw data, indicating that requiring raw data drove away more than half of the manuscripts. I rejected 19 out of the remaining 20 manuscripts because of insufficient raw data. Thus, more than 97% of the 41 manuscripts did not present the raw data supporting their results when requested by an editor, suggesting a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning, at least in some portions of these cases.Considering that any scientific study should be based on raw data, and that data storage space should no longer be a challenge, journals, in principle, should try to have their authors publicize raw data in a public database or journal site upon the publication of the paper to increase reproducibility of the published results and to increase public trust in science.

Boffins claim code was fine... when they wrote it

Dr James O’Sullivan examines 'reproducibility', one of the shortcomings of digital humanities, which uses computers to anaylse complex materials.

New analysis finds that education researchers, unlike scholars in many other disciplines, don't check one another's work.

Vicky Steeves is the Librarian for Research Data Management and Reproducibility at New York University - a dual appointment between NYU's Division of Libraries and Center for Data Science.

Is there something wrong with the scientific method?