‘More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments’. This is one of the results of an online Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers on reproducibility in research. Researchers were invited to take a brief online questionnaire with a focus on three topics: (1) How they view the ’crisis’ in reproducibility, (2) What contributes to problems in reproducibility, and (3) What should be done about it.
In this short report the results of the survey are presented and analyzed. It focuses in particular on the ‘confusing snapshot of attitudes’ that the collected data reveal. For example: ‘Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ’crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature’.
Publication
Title: 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility
Author: Baker M
doi: 10.1038/533452a (2016)