On the reproducibility of science: unique identification of research resources in the biomedical literature.

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, s

SUBMITTER: Vasilevsky NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3771067 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature