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How to increase reproducibility and transparency in your research

Contemporary science faces many challenges in publishing results that are reproducible. This is due to increased usage of data and digital technologies as well as heightened demands for scholarly communication. These challenges have led to widespread calls for more research transparency, accessibility, and reproducibility from the science community. This article presents current findings and solutions to these problems, including recent new software that makes writing submission-ready manuscripts for journals of Copernicus Publications a lot easier.

The reproducibility crisis in the age of digital medicine

As databases of medical information are growing, the cost of analyzing data is falling, and computer scientists, engineers, and investment are flooding into the field, digital medicine is subject to increasingly hyperbolic claims. Every week brings news of advances: superior algorithms that can predict clinical events and disease trajectory, classify images better than humans, translate clinical texts, and generate sensational discoveries around new risk factors and treatment effects. Yet the excitement about digital medicine—along with the technologies like the ones that enable a million people to watch a major event—poses risks for its robustness. How many of those new findings, in other words, are likely to be reproducible?

Science in hand: how art and craft can boost reproducibility

We — a surgeon, a research nurse and a synthetic chemist — looked beyond science to discover how people steeped in artistic skills might help to close this 'haptic gap', the deficit in skills of touch and object manipulation. We have found that craftspeople and performers can work fruitfully alongside scientists to address some of the challenges. We have also discovered striking similarities between the observational skills of an entomologist and an analytical chemist; the dexterity of a jeweller and a microsurgeon; the bodily awareness of a dancer and a space scientist; and the creative skills of a scientific glassblower, a reconstructive surgeon, a potter and a chef.

Editorial: Revised Guidelines to Enhance the Rigor and Reproducibility of Research Published in American Physiological Society Journals

A challenge in modern research is the common inability to repeat novel findings published in even the most “impact-heavy” journals. In the great majority of instances, this may simply be due to a failure of the published manuscripts to include—and the publisher to require— comprehensive information on experimental design, methods, reagents, or the in vitro and in vivo systems under study. Failure to accurately reproduce all environmental influences on an experiment, particularly those using animals, also contributes to inability to repeat novel findings. The most common reason for failures of reproducibility may well bein the rigor and transparency with which methodology is described by authors. Another reason may be the reluctance by more established investigators to break with traditional methods of data presentation. However, one size does not fit all when it comes to data presentation, particularly because of the wide variety of data formats presented in individual disciplines represented by journals. Thus, some flexibility needs to be allowed. The American Physiological Society (APS) has made available guidelines for transparent reporting that it recommends all authors follow(https://www.physiology.org/author-info.promoting-transparent-reporting) (https://www.physiology.org/author-info.experimental-details-to-report). These are just some of the efforts being made to facilitate the communication of discovery in a transparent manner, which complement what has been a strength of the discipline for many years—the ability of the scientists and scientific literature to self-correct (8).

The reproducibility opportunity

It is important for research users to know how likely it is that reported research findings are true. The Social Science Replication Project finds that, in highly powered experiments, only 13 of 21 high-profile reports could be replicated. Investigating the factors that contribute to reliable results offers new opportunities for the social sciences.

Scientists Only Able to Reproduce Results for 13 out of 21 Human Behavior Studies

If the results in a published study can’t be replicated in subsequent experiments, how can you trust what you read in scientific journals? One international group of researchers is well aware of this reproducibility crisis, and has been striving to hold scientists accountable. For their most recent test, they attempted to reproduce 21 studies from two of the top scientific journals, Science and Nature, that were published between 2010 and 2015. Only 13 of the reproductions produced the same results as the original study.