Epidemiological characteristics and prevalence rates of research reproducibility across disciplines: a scoping review of articles published in 2018-2019
- University of Ottawa, Canada
- Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil
- University of Toronto, Canada
- McGill University, Canada
- Stanford University, United States
- Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Canada
Abstract
Introduction: Reproducibility is a central tenant of research. We aimed to synthesize the literature on reproducibility and describe its epidemiological characteristics, including how reproducibility is defined and assessed. We also aimed to determine and compare estimates for reproducibility across different fields.
Methods: We conducted a scoping review to identify English language replication studies published between 2018-2019 in economics, education, psychology, health sciences and biomedicine. We searched Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature – CINAHL, Education Source via EBSCOHost, ERIC, EconPapers, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), and EconLit. Documents retrieved were screened in duplicate against our inclusion criteria. We extracted year of publication, number of authors, country of affiliation of the corresponding author, and whether the study was funded. For the individual replication studies, we recorded whether a registered protocol for the replication study was used, whether there was contact between the reproducing team and the original authors, what study design was used, and what the primary outcome was. Finally, we recorded how reproducibilty was defined by the authors, and whether the assessed study(ies) successfully reproduced based on this definition. Extraction was done by a single reviewer and quality controlled by a second reviewer.
Results: Our search identified 11,224 unique documents, of which 47 were included in this review. Most studies were related to either psychology (48.6%) or health sciences (23.7%). Among these 47 documents, 36 described a single reproducibility study while the remaining 11 reported at least two reproducibility studies in the same paper. Less than the half of the studies referred to a registered protocol. There was variability in the definitions of reproduciblity success. In total, across the 47 documents 177 studies were reported. Based on the definition used by the author of each study, 95 of 177 (53.7%) studies reproduced.
Conclusion: This study gives an overview of research across five disciplines that explicitly set out to reproduce previous research. Such reproducibility studies are extremely scarce, the definition of a successfully reproduced study is ambiguous, and the reproducibility rate is overall modest.
Funding: No external funding was received for this work.
Data availability
Data and materials are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/wn7gm/).
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Scoping review data on reproducibility of research in a 2018-2019 multi-discipline sampleOpen Science FrameworkDOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/WN7GM.
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Funding
The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
Copyright
© 2023, Cobey et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Epidemiological characteristics and prevalence rates of research reproducibility across disciplines: a scoping review of articles published in 2018-2019
eLife 12:e78518.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.78518
Further reading
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- Medicine
Background: Several fields have described low reproducibility of scientific research and poor accessibility in research reporting practices. Although previous reports have investigated accessible reporting practices that lead to reproducible research in other fields, to date, no study has explored the extent of accessible and reproducible research practices in cardiovascular science literature.
Methods: To study accessibility and reproducibility in cardiovascular research reporting, we screened 639 randomly selected articles published in 2019 in three top cardiovascular science publications: Circulation, the European Heart Journal, and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC). Of those 639 articles, 393 were empirical research articles. We screened each paper for accessible and reproducible research practices using a set of accessibility criteria including protocol, materials, data, and analysis script availability, as well as accessibility of the publication itself. We also quantified the consistency of open research practices within and across cardiovascular study types and journal formats.
Results: We identified that fewer than 2% of cardiovascular research publications provide sufficient resources (materials, methods, data, and analysis scripts) to fully reproduce their studies. Of the 639 articles screened, 393 were empirical research studies for which reproducibility could be assessed using our protocol, as opposed to commentaries or reviews. After calculating an accessibility score as a measure of the extent to which an article makes its resources available, we also showed that the level of accessibility varies across study types with a score of 0.08 for Case Studies or Case Series and 0.39 for Clinical Trials (p = 5.500E-5) and across journals (0.19 through 0.34, p = 1.230E-2). We further showed that there are significant differences in which study types share which resources.
Conclusion: Although the degree to which reproducible reporting practices are present in publications varies significantly across journals and study types, current cardiovascular science reports frequently do not provide sufficient materials, protocols, data, or analysis information to reproduce a study. In the future, having higher standards of accessibility mandated by either journals or funding bodies will help increase the reproducibility of cardiovascular research.
Funding: Authors Gabriel Heckerman, Arely Campos-Melendez, and Chisomaga Ekwueme were supported by an NIH R25 grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (R25HL147666). Eileen Tzng was supported by an AHA Institutional Training Award fellowship (18UFEL33960207).
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- Cell Biology
- Medicine
Background:
It has been reported that loss of PCBP2 led to increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and accelerated cell aging. Knockdown of PCBP2 in HCT116 cells leads to significant downregulation of fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2). Here, we tried to elucidate the intrinsic factors and potential mechanisms of bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (BMSCs) aging from the interactions among PCBP2, ROS, and FGF2.
Methods:
Unlabeled quantitative proteomics were performed to show differentially expressed proteins in the replicative senescent human bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (RS-hBMSCs). ROS and FGF2 were detected in the loss-and-gain cell function experiments of PCBP2. The functional recovery experiments were performed to verify whether PCBP2 regulates cell function through ROS/FGF2-dependent ways.
Results:
PCBP2 expression was significantly lower in P10-hBMSCs. Knocking down the expression of PCBP2 inhibited the proliferation while accentuated the apoptosis and cell arrest of RS-hBMSCs. PCBP2 silence could increase the production of ROS. On the contrary, overexpression of PCBP2 increased the viability of both P3-hBMSCs and P10-hBMSCs significantly. Meanwhile, overexpression of PCBP2 led to significantly reduced expression of FGF2. Overexpression of FGF2 significantly offset the effect of PCBP2 overexpression in P10-hBMSCs, leading to decreased cell proliferation, increased apoptosis, and reduced G0/G1 phase ratio of the cells.
Conclusions:
This study initially elucidates that PCBP2 as an intrinsic aging factor regulates the replicative senescence of hBMSCs through the ROS-FGF2 signaling axis.
Funding:
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82172474).
