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ERIC ED600638: The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science: Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform

A reproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social-scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to social psychology. Improper research techniques, lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results together have produced a critical state of affairs. Many supposedly scientific results cannot be reproduced reliably in subsequent investigations, and offer no trustworthy insight into the way the world works. Subsequent evidence confirmed that the crisis of reproducibility had compromised entire disciplines. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 "landmark" studies in hematology and oncology, but could only replicate six. In that same year the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration estimated that up to three-quarters of published biomarker associations could not be replicated. A 2015 article in "Science" that presented the results of 100 replication studies of articles published in prominent psychological journals found that only 36% of the replication studies produced statistically significant results, compared with 97

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