PNNL

Abstract

Public trust of scientific research is often affected by the clarity of published conclusions and also the perceived transparency of the method. Even among scientists, there is often a skeptical reception to new research because of difficulty and sometimes inability to recreate or reproduce the result. The silent crisis of irreproducibility has many potential contributing factors, including: pressure to publish groundbreaking results, the difficulty of a single peer expert to fully review multi-disciplinary team science endeavors, and perceived lack of scientific credit for replicating or disproving a previous result. Although irreproducibility is not exclusive to biology, strong public interest in environmental and biomedical discoveries seems to have focused the spotlight here following a number of high profile studies that failed to be reproduced