Science Magazine embraces reproducibility (finally)

Last week's issue of Science carried an editorial titled simply, "Reproducibility" (McNutt, 2014).  The Editor-in-Chief, Marcia McNutt, announced that Science would be adopting recommendations of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to encourage transparency and reproducible research in preclinical studies (Landis, et al., 2012).  In addition, the journal would spend the next six months gathering examples of "excellence in transparency" in order to further develop guidelines to incentive reproducible research.  Finally Science plans to add more statisticians to its editorial board, to involve them in manuscript review.  Science follows its sister journal, Science Translational Medicine, which has already adopted the NINDS guidelines, as well as Nature which published the NINDS guidelines and posted its own, discussed here. Although Science has certainly dragged its feet on this issue, in comparison to Nature, they should be commended for finally joining the bandwagon.

The NINDS paper (Landis, et al., 2012) is a small masterpiece.  Not only does it provide a concise and thoughtful list of issues that preclinical investigators should consider in the design, execution, and analysis of preclinical studies, the paper also provides a useful literature review documenting both the problems and the proposed solutions and their outcomes, particularly in comparison to the clinical trials literature.  I would also like to point readers to a more specific set of guidelines for preclinical imaging studies (Stout, et al., 2013).  (This blog, after all, is named after an imaging method.)

References

S. C. Landis, et al., 2012:  A call for transparent reporting to optimize the predictive value of preclinical research.  Nature, 490:  187-191.

M. McNutt, 2014:  Reproducibility.  Science, 343:  229.

D. Stout, et al., 2013:  Guidance for methods descriptions used in preclinical imaging papers.  Molecular Imaging, 2013:  1-15.