Reproducibility issues

This is a guest editorial by Richard Harris, a science correspondent at NPR and author of “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions.” Conversations about the “reproducibility crisis” in science often focus on preclinical medical research and social psychology experiments. There’s good reason for that. These fields generally rely on messy systems—living cells, animals, or in the case of psychology, human volunteers. But is reproducibility simply limited to those fields? The National Academies are about to start a study to look beyond those disciplines. And judging by the problems that drive reproducibility issues, the committee is likely to find problems elsewhere. Last year, Naturesurveyed 1,576 scientists from all disciplines. Overall, 52% perceived a “significant reproducibility crisis,” and another 38% said there was a “slight crisis.” Another 7% said they didn’t know, and only 3% said there was no crisis. In the case of biomedicine,