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Reproducibility: expect less of the scientific paper

Make science more reliable by placing the burden of replicability on the community, not on individual laboratories.
  1. Olavo B. Amaral

    1. Olavo B. Amaral is a neuroscientist working in meta-research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a coordinator of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.

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  2. Kleber Neves

    1. Kleber Neves is a neuroscientist working in meta-research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a coordinator of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.

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In 2018, we embarked on a journey to assess the reproducibility of biomedical research papers from Brazil. Thus began a multicentre collaboration of more than 60 laboratories to replicate 60 experiments from 2 decades of Brazilian publications1. We randomly selected experiments that used three common laboratory techniques: the MTT assay for cell viability, RT-PCR to measure specific messenger RNAs and the elevated plus maze to assess anxiety in rodents.

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Nature 597, 329-331 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02486-7

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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