ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Scientific progress despite irreproducibility: A seeming paradox.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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
17 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Opening doors to physical sample tracking and attribution in Earth and environmental sciences.Scientific data · 2025Article
- The inaccurate citation of the "Universal Declaration of Animal Rights" (UDAR) in the scientific literature: a scoping review.BMC veterinary research · 2025Article
- How can we make sound replication decisions?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Dialogues about the practice of science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Facilitating bioinformatics reproducibility with QIIME 2 Provenance Replay.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Establishing ground truth in the traumatic brain injury literature: if replication is the answer, then what are the questions?Brain communications · 2023Review
- Reproducibility in the Social Sciences.Annual review of sociology · 2022Article
- Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence? A discussion.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- Misinformation in and about science.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Review
- The case for formal methodology in scientific reform.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Understanding experiments and research practices for reproducibility: an exploratory study.PeerJ · 2021Article
- Ten simple rules for open human health research.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Assessing data availability and research reproducibility in hydrology and water resources.Scientific data · 2019Article
- Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity.PloS one · 2019Article
- Should social scientists be distanced from or engaged with the people they study?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Reproducibility of research: Issues and proposed remedies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible and invalid. Certainly, the practice of science needs to be improved, and scientists are now pursuing this goal. However, in this perspective, we argue that this seeming paradox is not new, has always been part of the way science works, and likely will remain so. We first introduce the paradox. We then review a wide range of challenges that appear to make scientific success difficult. Next, we describe the factors that make science work-in the past, present, and presumably also in the future. We then suggest that remedies for the present practice of science need to be applied selectively so as not to slow progress and illustrate with a few examples. We conclude with arguments that communication of science needs to emphasize not just problems but the enormous successes and benefits that science has brought and is now bringing to all elements of modern society.
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.