We’re pleased to present a guest post from Dorothy Bishop, a researcher who focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders at Oxford University, and is also heavily involved in efforts to improve reproducibility in science, including chairing the steering committee of a recent symposium on the topic organised by the Academy of Medical Sciences. Here, she talks about one of the themes that emerged from that symposium – the crucial role of funders in boosting reproducibility.
Look at the selection criteria for any major funding agency, and you will find it aims to support research that is “ground-breaking,” “innovative,” “high-risk,” and “at the frontiers of knowledge.”
But are these criteria delivering the best science? Think about the “reproducibility crisis,” familiar to many Retraction Watch readers: Evidence is growing that a high proportion of published research findings are not robust. This is bad news for funders; irreproducible research is a waste of money, and actually impedes scientific progress by filling the literature with irreproducible false-positive findings that, once published, never die.
A major source of irreproducibility comes from research that is funded but never reported. As I have noted previously, many researchers have a backlog of unpublished findings. All too often, they sit on a mountain of data that is unpublished simply because it is not the most exciting thing on their desk, and they need to be working on a new project in order to remain competitive. Negative results – e.g. where a promising treatment shows no effect, or an anticipated association between a genotype and phenotype fails to emerge — are likely to end up in the file drawer. By lingering in obscurity, they contribute to publication bias and the consequent distortion of the truth.
In October, the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) published a report considering reasons for irreproducibility in biomedical research and ways to overcome them. It was clear that the problem was not down to any one cause, and that a range of solutions needed to be considered — some bottom-up (such as better training of researchers), and some top-down, driven by institutions, publishers and, the focus of this post, funders.
To my mind, the most important thing that funders could do is to treat reproducibility as a key criterion for funding research. Here are some specifics: Continue reading Improving reproducibility: What can funders do? Guest post by Dorothy Bishop
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