Happy New Year! This is the 5th lesson in a 7-lesson course and it is first being posted in 2019. We hope students continue to find it useful any time!
If you have been listenting to current science news, you might have heard the terms reproducibility and replication, particularly in the context of whether we should trust scientific results.
The video in this lesson is a very measured and truthful look at science reproducibility (Thanks TedEd! https://ed.ted.com/lessons/is-there-a-reproducibility-crisis-in-science-matt-anticole,CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To get you started, reproducibility is a term used to ask whether a scientific finding can be reproduced, that is, similar results obtained if the experiment is performed again, preferably at a different point in time and by different researchers. If you stop to think about it, this is what we expect when we develop therapeutics. A replication refers to an experiment that replicates a previous experiment, not necessarily the results but an experimental design such that the reproducibility of the original finding can be assessed.
After you watch the video, ask yourself
- What information would you want to have to trust the results of a figure in a paper?
- What can you do, as someone who reads science and/or has just started to conduct experiments to improve science reproducibility?
When you are ready to move to the discussion where we offer some suggestions to complement your reflections, go to Part 2.
To discuss this video, ask questions, offer feedback or get assistance on creating your own literature review project, please fill out this form.
Previous links|Introduction | Week 1: Open Access and Introduction to Scientific Papers | Week 2: Let’s start reading papers and creating research outputs! | Week 3: Tools and strategies to find papers and save your literature review | Week 4: Are you too inexperienced to start building a science identity? | Week 5: Reproducibility of scientific findings, Part 2
