Irreproducibility in Research. What can we do about it?

2016

We all would agree with Karl Popper's statement: 'Non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.' But what if a substantial percentage of published scientific facts are of the irreproducible category? Such an alarming scenario may be close to reality, according to a number of recent reports. Indeed, some shocking statistics suggest that irreproducibility has gone awry in the last years. For instance, pharma and biotech companies can only reproduce between 11 and 25% high-impact research papers in the field of cancer research.