Research reliability must improve

Abstract

Science isn’t facing a reproducibility catastrophe, but the scientific community could take important steps to improve reporting and replicability, according to a new report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “There is no crisis but also no time for complacency,” says Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and chair of the National Academies committee that examined the issue. Scientists’ inability to replicate or confirm research studies—and few incentives for them to try—has been an increasing concern in the research community. That spurred the US Congress to ask for this study, which was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. The National Academies committee focused on computational reproducibility because of its role as a tool across all sciences. The report is relevant to chemistry, especially in computational chemistry and machine learning, says computational chemist Joshua Schrier, a professor at Fordham University. “The