The Academy of Medical Sciences has published a new joint report on how the reproducibility and reliability of research can be improved. Recent reports in the general and scientific media show there is increasing concern within the biomedical research community about the lack of reproducibility of key research findings.

The MRC and a group of partner organisations have today published a report and joint statement about the reproducibility and reliability of research, and what can be done to improve them. Here, Jim Smith, MRC Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Strategy, thinks about how discussions of reproducibility offer us the opportunity to improve the way science is done.

Researchers tested the credibility of past investigations reaching the conclusion of a new study: scientific researches are not always reliable. Few of the past studies could be replicated showing that some researches are either too biased or too distinctive to make a statement in history.

A decade ago, John P.A. Ioannidis published a provocative and much-discussed paper arguing that most published research findings are false. It’s starting to look like he was right.

A study that sought to replicate 100 findings published in three prominent psychology journals has found that, across multiple criteria, independent researchers could replicate less than half of the original findings. In some cases this may call into question the validity of some scientific findings, but it may also point to the difficulty of conducting effective replications and achieving reproducible results.

In collaboration with the University of Washington (UW) and Berkeley, and under the sponsorship of the Moore and Sloan foundations, NYU is working on a new initiative to 'harness the potential of data scientists and big data'. As part of this initiative, we aim to increase awareness of sharing, preservation, provenance, and reproducibility best practices across UW, NYU, Berkeley campuses and encourage their adoption.