Scientists’ Elusive Goal: Reproducing Study Results , an article published on the first page of the Wall Street Journal, describes the crisis of scientific reproducibility in bio-medical research.


Many of the issues described in the article sound familiar.

…Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can’t be validated by others, there are major consequences…

…There is also a more insidious and pervasive problem: a preference for positive results…

…Some studies can’t be redone for a more prosaic reason: the authors won’t make all their raw data available to rival scientists…

Geophysical research does not affect human lives directly but its quality can suffer from non-reproducibility in very much the same way.