ArticlePeerJ2013
On the reproducibility of science: unique identification of research resources in the biomedical literature.
Article in PeerJ, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 117 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
117 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Quantity and Reporting Quality of Kidney Research.Journal of the American Society of Nephrology : JASN · 2019Pooled it
- Modeling sources of interlaboratory variability in electrophysiological properties of mammalian neurons.Journal of neurophysiology · 2018Pooled it
- Improve genetic quality control to increase rigor and reproducibility of mouse research.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Review
- Misspellings or "miscellings"-Non-verifiable and unknown cell lines in cancer research publications.International journal of cancer · 2024Article
- Antibody characterization is critical to enhance reproducibility in biomedical research.eLife · 2024Review
- Checklist for Reproducibility of Deep Learning in Medical Imaging.Journal of imaging informatics in medicine · 2024Article
- Do organisms need an impact factor? Citations of key biological resources including model organisms reveal usage patterns and impact.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Establishing an early indicator for data sharing and reuse.Learned publishing : journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers · 2024Article
- The Status of Data Management Practices Across German Medical Data Integration Centers: Mixed Methods Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Motivation for using data-driven algorithms in research: A review of machine learning solutions for image analysis of micrographs in neuroscience.Journal of neuropathology and experimental neurology · 2023Review
- The Antibody Registry: ten years of registering antibodies.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- Genetic quality: a complex issue for experimental study reproducibility.Transgenic research · 2022Review
- Insufficient reporting of experimental variables as a cause for nonreproducibility in animal physiology? A case study.American journal of physiology. Regulatory, integrative and comparative physiology · 2022Review
- Blind spots on western blots: Assessment of common problems in western blot figures and methods reporting with recommendations to improve them.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Establishing Institutional Scores With the Rigor and Transparency Index: Large-scale Analysis of Scientific Reporting Quality.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Article
- A decade of GigaScience: What can be learned from half a million RRIDs in the scientific literature?GigaScience · 2022Article
- MALDI-TOF-MS-Based Identification of Monoclonal Murine Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies within One Hour.Antibodies (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Article
57 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Scientific reproducibility has been at the forefront of many news stories and there exist numerous initiatives to help address this problem. We posit that a contributor is simply a lack of specificity that is required to enable adequate research reproducibility. In particular, the inability to uniquely identify research resources, such as antibodies and model organisms, makes it difficult or impossible to reproduce experiments even where the science is otherwise sound. In order to better understand the magnitude of this problem, we designed an experiment to ascertain the "identifiability" of research resources in the biomedical literature. We evaluated recent journal articles in the fields of Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Immunology, Cell and Molecular Biology and General Biology, selected randomly based on a diversity of impact factors for the journals, publishers, and experimental method reporting guidelines. We attempted to uniquely identify model organisms (mouse, rat, zebrafish, worm, fly and yeast), antibodies, knockdown reagents (morpholinos or RNAi), constructs, and cell lines. Specific criteria were developed to determine if a resource was uniquely identifiable, and included examining relevant repositories (such as model organism databases, and the Antibody Registry), as well as vendor sites. The results of this experiment show that 54% of resources are not uniquely identifiable in publications, regardless of domain, journal impact factor, or reporting requirements. For example, in many cases the organism strain in which the experiment was performed or antibody that was used could not be identified. Our results show that identifiability is a serious problem for reproducibility. Based on these results, we provide recommendations to authors, reviewers, journal editors, vendors, and publishers. Scientific efficiency and reproducibility depend upon a research-wide improvement of this substantial problem in science today.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.