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Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

nature.com

21–30 of 184 posts

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#21
post #5

An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!

Exactly. This should be the top comment. Are we just supposed to assume their work was true based on trust? Perhaps this 'study' was actually just a fleecing meant to show that we take too many studies to be true based on simple trust.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#22
post #4

This is one of the reasons I went into math and software. In math there is only black and white, provably true and patently wrong. Still, part of the reason this is so is that to show any results everything must be laid on the table. CS and Math papers are therefore open by design and the world has benefited. I hope the rest of science will move in this direction.

Pick a paper on NLP. Measures of document relevance and summary quality are not black and white, especially when you account for the ways the authors munged their test sets and scores.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#23
Wow, that's sad. Are we really so blind when it comes to cancer research?

I recall that oncology journals usually have a ludicrously high impact index (as ludicrously as 5 digit IIRC); that means there are a lot of citations, which is an indicator that there is a lot of research going on. And with a lot of research going on, well, you can expect a lot of false positives. So, I'm wondering, could this be a case of cherry-picking or some kind of selection bias? It wouldn't be difficult to select a lot of bogus-sounding research and test it.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#25
post #5

An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!

Nature wrote an editorial justifying the situation, you can read it here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e...

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#26

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p... Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Is this analysis a published scientific research?

Joking aside, the authors of these studies have highlighted the low statistical power of research in a number of fields (see also http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v14/n5/abs/nrn3475.html), which is a serious issue that often leads to over-interpretation. It's as if researches willing to publish more are rushing hasty studies out the door.

It's a good thing that people can measure these things and ring the alarm

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#27
I have been in discussions about this with one of my friends working in academic materials research. Its amazing the amount of work today done by scientist at universities writing code without very basic software development tools.

I'm talking opening their code in notepad, 'versioning' files by sending around zip files with numbers manually added to the end of the file name, etc.

This doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the 'reproducible results' problem. Often times, the software I've seen is 'rough' to be kind. Most times its not even possible to get the software running (missing some really specific library or some changes to a dependency which haven't been distributed) or its built for a super specific environment and makes huge assumptions on what can 'be assumed about the system.' This same software produces results which end up being published in journals.

If any of these places had money to spend, I think there could be a valuable business in teaching science types how to better manage their software. Its really unfortunate that outside of a few core libraries (numpy, etc.) the default method is for each researcher to rebuild the components they need.

I'm surprised about only 11% of results being reproducible. It seems lower then I'd expect. I agree we don't want to optimize for reproducibility, but obviously there is some problem here that needs to be addressed.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#28

What the hell? That's 5.83 papers. How do you reproduce .83 of something?

Um, 6 papers out of 53, significant digits give you 11%. Not that difficult.

I guess saying "11% of 53 papers" was cooler than saying "6 out of 53". Meh.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#29
post #5

An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!

Exactly. This should be the top comment. Are we just supposed to assume their work was true based on trust? Perhaps this 'study' was actually just a fleecing meant to show that we take too many studies to be true based on simple trust.

It should not be the top comment. The original article is an explanation of WHY this was done. If a comment is posted explaining why the study was a bad idea or should not have been published despite this explanation THAT should be the top comment.

Re: Just 11% of 53 cancer research papers were reproducible

#30
post #5

An article claiming that only 11% of findings could be reproduced doesn't cite its sources, thus rendering the findings of the article unreproducible. Nice work!

Nature wrote an editorial justifying the situation, you can read it here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7396/full/485041e...

> "those authors required them to sign an agreement that they would not disclose their findings about specific papers"

I don't know why this doesn't cause a huge stir in the scientific community. Seems like everyone is fine with people sweeping their negative data under the rug. Shameful is a very mild word for that.

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