Adhering faithfully to the scientific method is at the very heart of psychological inquiry. It requires scientists to be passionately dispassionate, to be intensely interested in scientific questions but not wedded to the answers. It asks that scientists not personally identify with their past work or theories — even those that bear their names — so that science as a whole can inch ever closer to illuminating elusive truths. That compliance isn’t so easy. But those who champion the so-called replication revolution in psychological science believe that it is possible — with the right structural reforms and personal incentives.

When graduate student Alyssa Ward took a science-policy internship, she expected to learn about policy — not to unearth gaps in her biomedical training. She was compiling a bibliography about the reproducibility of experiments, and one of the papers, a meta-analysis, found that scientists routinely fail to explain how they choose the number of samples to use in a study. "My surprise was not about the omission — it was because I had no clue how, or when, to calculate sample size," Ward says. Nor had she ever been taught about major categories of experimental design, or the limitations of P values. (Although they can help to judge the strength of scientific evidence, P values do not — as many think — estimate the likelihood that a hypothesis is true.)

It seems like the most elementary of research principles: Make sure the cells and reagents in your experiment are what they claim to be and behave as expected. But when it comes to antibodies—the immune proteins used in all kinds of experiments to tag a molecule of interest in a sample—that validation process is not straightforward. Research antibodies from commercial vendors are often screened and optimized for narrow experimental conditions, which means they may not work as advertised for many scientists. Indeed, problems with antibodies are thought to have led many drug developers astray and generated a host of misleading or irreproducible scientific results.

Reproducing palaeontological results depends on unrestricted access to fossils described in the literature, allowing others to re-examine or reinterpret them. Museums have policies and protocols for keeping materials in the public trust, but accessibility to privately owned fossil collections can be a problem.

There’s been a lot of discussion across many scientific fields about the "reproducibility crisis" in the past few years. Hundreds of psychologists attempted to redo 100 studies as part of the Reproducibility Project in Psychology, and claimed that fewer than half of the replication attempts succeeded. In Biomedicine, a study from the biotech firm Amgen tried to re-create results of 53 "landmark" preclinical cancer studies, and only got the same results for six of them. Amid a growing concern about research reliability, funders including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have called for a greater effort to make research reproducible through transparent reporting of the methods researchers use to conduct their investigations.

The ongoing dialogue has included the role of improperly validated research reagents, such as antibodies, with blame falling at the feet of reagent vendors, researchers, and journals. This article will highlight how the lack of consistent research on antibody validation has contributed to the reproducibility crisis and the role of vendors from Cell Signaling Technology’s (CST) perspective in making research more robust and reproducible.