Cancer scientists are having trouble replicating groundbreaking research

Take the latest findings from the large-scale Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology. Here, researchers focused on reproducing experiments from the highest-impact papers about cancer biology published from 2010 to 2012. They shared their results in five papers in the journal ELife last week — and not one of their replications definitively confirmed the original results. The findings echoed those of another landmark reproducibility project, which, like the cancer biology project, came from the Center for Open Science. This time, the researchers replicated major psychology studies — and only 36 percent of them confirmed the original conclusions.