Ferric Fang (University of Washington)
Research reproducibility is increasingly questioned. Explosive growth of the literature and hypercompetition among scientists are not conducive to good scientific practices. Proposals to make research more reproducible emphasize scientific rigor with little guidance as to what that means and how it can be achieved. Casadevall and Fang propose a framework for scientific rigor: (1) redundancy in experimental design; (2) sound statistical anaysis; (3) recognition of error; (4) avoidance of logical traps; and (5) intellectual honesty (MBio, 2016). Although this can guide research education, such efforts will be ineffective unless accompanied by a cultural change that rewards rigorous work over impact.
