cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/514928

Reproducibility is an important aspect of science; reproducibility allows for alternate viewpoints; improvements in the referrant study; and verification that the referrant study is actually possible.

It could just be my perspective when reading studies; but I’m not seeing much scientists actively attempt to reproduce the result of the referrant study.

EDIT: or I’m just not seeing it somehow.

  • Salamander
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    41 year ago

    In my field (physical chemistry) we build on each other’s work. We often measure similar or even the same systems, and apply other people’s models to our own. We are usually not going to go out of our way to re-do the experiment that someone else has already done, but when we do our own experiments we confirm whether our observations agree with what we expect based on what is already published in the literature. If they don’t, we might actually try to replicate those previous experiments, and at the very least we will point out the inconsistencies in our publications. Through this process “bad” results erode over time.

  • Not sure what studies you’re reading, every field handles reproduction step in their a tad paper differently. In my old field (neuro roughly) its assumed the reader has enough familiarity with laboratory work and related concepts/jargon that by looking through the methodology section and the logic put forth in the rest of the paper they could figure out what the OG papers’ authors had in mind and recreate the study. This is also a knowledge gate depending on the field since it may or may not require additional knowledge of stats, research design and so on, and can be an unfortunate thing about science in its current state.

    Back when I was in school if something was a little rough you could see something played out in real time for some papers on JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), but now Youtube, bio hackerspaces, and Tiktok are bigger so if you were a bit confused you could look at those for basic stuff.

    I hope that helps and wasn’t too rambly.