Neuroskeptic readers will know that there's been a lot of concern lately over unreproducible results and false positives in psychology and neuroscience.
In response to these worries, there have been growing calls for reform of the way psychology is researched and published. We've seen several initiatives promoting replication and, to my mind even more importantly, registration of studies to prevent bad scientific practice in future. But the problem is not limited to psychology. Concern is growing too in cancer biology, as revealed in a new study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas: A Survey on Data Reproducibility in Cancer Research. The researchers polled all of the nearly 3000 staff at the center. Unfortunately, just 15% responded, but of those that did, 55% reported having been unable to reproduce a published result, but only 33% of those published it. This joins other reports into the poor reproducibility of preclinical ...
