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Activity Number: 471
Type: Invited
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
Sponsor: ASA
Abstract #314129 View Presentation
Title: Tracking to Ground the Causes of Irreproducibility: Some Challenges
Author(s): Marcia McNutt*+
Companies: American Association for the Advancement of Science
Keywords:
Abstract:

When published science is found to be irreproducible, time and money are wasted, and scientists lose credibility. Therefore, it is helpful to understand the origins of the failure to reproduce studies. Only a very small fraction are ever found to be the result of purposeful fraud in which the experimenter intended to mislead other scientists. Typically, the source is more complex. One factor that is increasingly coming to light is the effect of dependent variables that were not previously thought to be significant. One prominent example is the recent discovery of the difference in lab animal response depending on whether the experimenter is male or female. Decades of published animal studies never reported the sex of the experimenter. Another big issue is bias on the part of the experimenter. The impact of bias can be subtle in terms of detecting it in the published work. For example, it may have been manifest in terms of which experiments to publish and which to shelve. For that reason, there is no replacement for complete transparency in reporting results and approaching research from the perspective of one's strongest critic.


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