Standard reporting of the uncertainty in reaction yield applied to a CO2 transfer reaction

In the organic literature, reaction yields are typically reported as single values with no estimate of uncertainty that would enable others to judge the reproducibility of reported procedures. Herein, we demonstrate a simple, standardised approach for reporting reaction yield as its mean value, accompanied by a confidence interval calculated from repeat experiments. We use CO2 transfer carboxylation to show that variability plots and confidence intervals provide interpretable measures of yield reproducibility and are useful tools to identify outliers and prompt scrutiny of scale-up behaviour or sources of experimental variability. We make recommendations for best practice in reporting the variability of experimental outcomes and introduce a secure browser-based tool, the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) Variability Plot Generator, to facilitate transparent reporting of process reproducibility.