I’ve written several times about the reroducibility crisis. That crisis is the fact that an astoundingly large percentage of scientific experiments can’t be reproduced by other researchers. That, of course, calls into question the validity of the original results.
My traditional poster child for this is Psychology where the irreproducibility rate is around 40–50%: essentially a coin toss. But that’s Psychology and for most studies it doesn’t matter much whether the results are right or wrong. Sadly, the problem is much more serious:
People in my mentions are accusing me of bullshitting when I say that the replication crisis is worse in medicine than psychology. I’m not. This survey in @nature finds it effects all fields including chemistry & physics https://t.co/gQScnCZPDt
— Claire Lehmann (@clairlemon) November 2, 2020
If you click on the tweet and follow the thread, you learn, among other things, that only 11% of cancer studies are reproducible. 11 percent! That’s not only shocking, it’s terrifying. The Nature article that Lehmann refers to is here.