Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

The cancer biologist Florian Markowetz, in a paper about how scientists should take advantage of new automated tools to make the links between their data, their analysis and their papers crystal clear, gives ‘five selfish reasons to work reproducibly’: 1. Making your data open and transparent helps you and your co-authors to spot errors that might undermine your results, stopping your study from becoming the next Reinhart-Rogoff Excel-typo disaster. 2. The new automated methods make the paper easier to write. 3. If anyone can see how you analysed your data, it’s easier to convince reviewers that you did the right thing (and if the data are available, they can even try running your analysis for themselves). 4. Documenting every step of the analysis openly helps you continue your work a few months down the line: ‘future you’ won’t have to rely on memory of what ‘past you’ did. 5. Making everything available shows the scientific community that you’ve nothing to hide and that you’ve done everything in good faith: in other words, it builds your reputation as an honest researcher.114 We clearly see the problem. The solutions are within our grasp. All we need to fix science is to give people the right motivation.