Free Republic

Lack of rigour is often blamed on pressure to publish. But ethnographers can find out what truly keeps science from upping its game.A decade ago, the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke convened a workshop on how to improve the rigour of preclinical research. Its recommendations were surprisingly straightforward: scientists should mask (or ‘blind’) their studies; randomize; estimate appropriate sample sizes; and specify rules for data handling (S. C. Landis et al. Nature 490, 187–191; 2012). Ten years on, many preclinical scientists still do not take these basic steps. Ask most advocates of rigorous science why this is,...

A couple of years ago, Julia Strand was trying and failing to replicate a study she’d published. At the time, she was an assistant professor without tenure, and the original study had presented her most exciting finding to date. But when she and her co-authors tried to replicate it, they got the opposite results. Then one night, Julia discovered why. In her original code, she’d made a tiny but critical error, and now, with her reputation and job on the line, she was going to have to tell the world about it. Science is often said to be “self-correcting”—through peer...

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Psychologists are in the midst of an ongoing, difficult reckoning. Many believe that their field is experiencing a “reproducibility crisis,” because they’ve tried and failed to repeat experiments done by their peers. Even classic results—the stuff of textbooks and TED talks—have proven surprisingly hard to replicate, perhaps because they’re the results of poor methods and statistical tomfoolery. These problems have spawned a community of researchers dedicated to improving the practices of their field and forging a more reliable way of doing science. These attempts at reform have met resistance. Critics have argued that the so-called crisis is nothing of the...

Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that many experimentally established “facts” don’t seem to hold up to repeated investigation. This was highlighted in a 2010 article in the New Yorker entitled The Truth Wears Off and since then, there have been many popular press accounts of different aspects of science’s current reproducibility crisis. These include an exposé of the increasing number of retractions by scientific journals and damning demonstrations of failures to replicate high profile studies. Articles in recent days have discussed how the majority of scientists might be more interested in funding and fame...