Following up on our previous post on “How Fake Science is Strongly on the Rise and Endangers Us“, the issue or reproducibility in science is also coming up strongly: even paper and findings recognized as legitimate for a long time are put in question by the inability to reproduce results, and more specifically in human sciences. This post ‘Why Your Company Needs Reproducible Research‘ provides a good summary of the issues at stake.
Recent efforts are reproducing psychology results lead to “Only about 40% of the findings could be successfully replicated, while the rest were either inconclusive or definitively not replicated.” Similar proportions are obtained in business-related research.
While this may be due to very human bias like the need to show some results from research, and the inherent complexity of the environment around some experiments, there is definitely a need for more thorough replication requirements prior to confirming results. This puts more challenge on researchers but is probably a need in a world that sees increasingly fake science.
Science will always progress by invalidating previous results or restraining the boundaries of validity of previous results. This is a normal process, still we need to be wary to ensure reproducibility of results before they are spread as invariant truths.
