Understanding experiments and research practices for reproducibility: an exploratory study

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Introduction

  1. What leads to a reproducibility crisis in science?

  2. What are the different experiment workflows and research practices followed in various fields?

  3. What are the current measures taken in different fields to ensure reproducibility of results?

  4. Has the introduction of FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016) influenced the research practices?

  5. Which research practices could improve reproducibility in general?

Methods

Participants.

Materials.

Procedure.

Results

Reproducibility crisis and its causing factors

Measures taken in different fields to ensure reproducibility of results

Important factors to understand a scientific experiment to enable reproducibility

Experiment workflows and research practices followed in different disciplines

Discussion

Limitations

Reproducible research recommendations

Conclusions

Supplemental Information

Do the survey participants think whether there is a reproducibility crisis in their field of research?

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-1

Research practices: What kind of data do the survey participants work primarily with?

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-2

Research practices: Where do the survey participants store their experimental data files?

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-3

Where do the survey participants save their experimental metadata like descriptions of experiment, methods, samples used?

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-4

Recommendations for documentation and management of end-to-end experiment workflow for reproducible research

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-5

Reproducibility crisis based on the survey participants grouped based on their position

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-6

Reproducibility crisis in each field of the survey participants

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-7

The opinion of survey participants on sharing metadata on the 34 factors to reproduce published experiment results

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.11140/supp-8

Additional Information and Declarations

Competing Interests

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Sheeba Samuel conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft.

Birgitta König-Ries conceived and designed the experiments, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, and approved the final draft.

Data Availability

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

Data is available at Zenodo:

Sheeba Samuel, & Birgitta König-Ries. (2020, May 28). fusion-jena/ReproducibilitySurvey: ReproducibilitySurvey 0.1 (Version 0.1). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3862597.

Funding

This research is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in Project Z2 of the CRC/TRR 166 High-end light microscopy elucidates membrane receptor function - ReceptorLight. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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