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Humanity would understand very little about cancer, and be hard-pressed to find cures, without scientific research. But what if, when teams recreated each other's research, they didn't arrive at the same result?
That's what the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology of the Center for Open Science is attempting to do—redo parts of 50 important cancer studies and compare their results. They released their first five replications today, and it turns out that not all of the data is matching up. At least once in every paper, a result reported as statistically significant (the way scientists calculate whether an effect is caused by more than chance alone) was not statistically significant in the replicated study. In two of the cases, the differences between the initial and replicated studies were even more striking, giving the Center for Open Science researchers cause for concern
"I was surprised by the results because of all that homework that we did" to make sure the studies were being reproduced accurately, Tim Errington, Project Manager at the Center for Open Science told Gizmodo. "We thought we were crossing every T and dotting every I... Seeing some of these experimental systems not behave the same was something I was not expecting to happen."
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday February 05 2017, @12:44AM
However, reproducibility should not be defined by comparing the significance of p-values of the studies.
Sorry, those p-values are big parts of the studies. And where's the funding to aggressively push forward on a hundred different studies? Merely replicating the studies (which is what's being done here), is pretty hard on its own.