Reproducibility Crisis Timeline: Milestones in Tackling Research Reliability

It’s not a new story, although "the reproducibility crisis" may seem to be. For life sciences, I think it started in the late 1950s. Problems caused in clinical research burst into the open in a very public way then. But before we get to that, what is "research reproducibility"? It’s a euphemism for unreliable research or research reporting. Steve Goodman and colleagues (2016) say 3 dimensions of science that affect reliability are at play: Methods reproducibility – enough detail available to enable a study to be repeated; Results reproducibility – the findings are replicated by others; Inferential reproducibility – similar conclusions are drawn about results, which brings statistics and interpretation squarely into the mix. There is a lot of history behind each of those. Here are some of the milestones in awareness and proposed solutions that stick out for me.