Science’s self-criticism makes the enterprise stronger

Ever since John Ioannidis published his influential 2005 essay about the statistical problems plaguing science, there has been deepening concern about the enterprise. Are most scientific findings wrong? Have quality control and informed skepticism given way to publish-or-perish and headline grabbing? If science is self-correcting, why isn’t it working?

In response to such concerns, many scientists (and scientific institutions) have become more self-reflective about how science works and how it might be improved, as Tina Hesman Saey reports in “Is redoing scientific research the best way to find truth?” In the first of a two-part series, Saey describes efforts to look specifically at one part of science’s self-correction system: the ability to reproduce experimental findings.