Scientific papers need better feedback systems. Here's why

Somewhere between 65 and 90 per cent of biomedical literature is considered non-reproducible. This means that if you try to reproduce an experiment described in a given paper, 65 to 90 per cent of the time you won't get the same findings. We call this the reproducibility crisis. The issue became live thanks to a study by Glenn Begley, who ran the oncology department at Amgen, a pharmaceutical company. In 2011, Begley decided to try to reproduce findings in 53 foundational papers in oncology: highly cited papers published in the top journals. He was unable to reproduce 47 of them - 89 per cent.