This week in science, academia and publishing for reproducibility.

We compared the repeatability, reproducibility (intra- and inter-measurer similarity), separative power and subjectivity (measurer effect on results) of four morphometric methods frequently used in ichthyological research, the “traditional” caliper-based (TRA) and truss-network (TRU) distance methods and two geometric methods that compare landmark coordinates on the body (GMB) and scales (GMS).

Remi Rampin and Fernando Chirigati of NYU will be presenting ReproZip at this year's SIGMOD ACM conference. ReproZip enables a researcher to create a compendium of his/her Linux experiment by automatically tracking and identifying all its required dependencies (data files, libraries, configuration files, etc.).

Jeremy Berg, the incoming editor-in-chief of Science magazine, will be grappling with a number of issues plaguing science and science publishing when he takes over that role, Retraction Watch's Shannon Palus writes. Berg has previously supported efforts to bolster reproducibility and transparency, Palus notes. He tells her that there are a number of efforts aimed at improving reproducibility underway at Science, but as he hasn't started the position yet — he's to take the helm in July — he needs to catch up on what's already been done. He says various issues could be behind the irreproducibility problem and, to be effective, any response has to be tailored to that issue.

Researchers tease out different definitions of a crucial scientific term. A semantic confusion is clouding one of the most talked-about issues in research. Scientists agree that there is a crisis in reproducibility, but they can’t agree on what 'reproducibility' means.

Functional brain hubs are key integrative regions in brain networks. Recently, brain hubs identified through resting-state fMRI have emerged as interesting targets to increase understanding of the relationships between large-scale functional networks and psychopathology. However, few studies have directly addressed the replicability and consistency of the hub regions identified and their association with symptoms. Here, we used the eigenvector centrality (EVC) measure obtained from graph analysis of two large, independent population-based samples of children and adolescents (7-15 years old; total N=652; 341 subjects for site 1 and 311 for site 2) to evaluate the replicability of hub identification. Subsequently, we tested the association between replicable hub regions and psychiatric symptoms. We identified a set of hubs consisting of the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal lobule/intraparietal sulcus (IPL/IPS). Moreover, lower EVC values in the right IPS were associated with psychiatric symptoms in both samples. Thus, low centrality of the IPS was a replicable sign of potential vulnerability to mental disorders in children. The identification of critical and replicable hubs in functional cortical networks in children and adolescents can foster understanding of the mechanisms underlying mental disorders.