1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility

Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia. You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1]. The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a#citeas [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

> Will other scientists come to the same results when they perform a published experiment in their own lab? Betteridge says "no" - https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a for instance...

Funny that you should say that. It's not just the social sciences that are having a replication crisis. [1] So this appears to be some sort of broad social problem that we don't totally understand. Seems like we need people who study societies to help figure it out. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

This is really confusing the messenger with the message. The problem is not limited to psychology, it's that psychology historically and currently is where meta-science usually happens (modern meta-analysis has its roots in educational and clinical psychology): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

The footnote provided[1] for this sentence in the intro does not actually mention the word "natural": Data strongly indicate that other natural, and social sciences are affected as well. It only writes that physicists and chemists are the most confident in their fields' results, and that a biochemistry graduate student is complaining about the effort it takes to replicate results. It also writes that 70+% of researchers have failed to replicate an experiment. But that is very far from saying that 70+% of all experiments don't replicate. And the figure given by parent is 90+%. The Prevalence section of the Wikipedia page talks about psychology, medicine, economics, and other social sciences. Medicine is arguably a natural science. But parent’s comment made me think it’s referring to results in physics or chemistry. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a

https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a > More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. If 70% the GNU/Linux installations failed to boot, are you sure you'd take it on faith?

Most academic researchers (https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a) believe that we're facing a phenomenon called the "reproducibility crisis" or "replication crisis", where experimental papers regularly get published even though the experiment does not work as described. This leads to more general doubts about the quality of papers in general - if you know you can't trust that experiments will reproduce, should you trust that survey data is accurate or that analyses are correct?