National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya (left) has advocated for more scientists to attempt to reproduce or replicate others\u2019 published research, testing the quality of findings.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Wiggs\/The Boston Globe\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The National Institutes of Health is planning a five-year, roughly $174\u00a0million effort to encourage more scientists to test other researchers\u2019 published findings.<\/p>\n
The agency is a massive funder of university biomedical research. In an editorial<\/a> Thursday in Science, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya discussed the need for the Rigor, Replicability, and Reproducibility to Promote Excellence, Accuracy, and Translation in Science program\u2014or R3PEATS.<\/p>\n \u201cNew discoveries naturally attract the most attention within and outside the scientific community, whereas studies seeking to confirm already published work rarely do,\u201d Bhattacharya wrote. \u201cThe latter includes research that tests scientific questions in different ways to determine whether findings are robust and broadly applicable (reproducibility) and research that repeats studies using the same methods and conditions to determine whether the same results can be achieved (replicability). As a result of this attention imbalance, substantial time, talent, and resources can be consumed chasing findings that may not hold up under further evaluation.\u201d<\/p>\n Bhattacharya has repeatedly said he wants NIH to do more to promote replication studies. He\u2019s floated starting an in-house journal to publish them, though it hasn\u2019t yet appeared. But the new initiatives could lead to an increase in the number of publications that confirm or debunk previous findings.<\/p>\n R3PEATS will comprise four initiatives to study \u201cpractical ways to incentivize and support rigorous and replicable research,\u201d according to a document NIH provided Inside Higher Ed on Friday. <\/p>\n The program plans to fund, among other things, projects in which two to five teams each \u201cwill jointly address the same scientific question(s) using complementary methods and outcome measures to generate a fuller biological understanding than a single study usually provides.\u201d <\/p>\n NIH also plans to offer paid fellowships for \u201crigor ambassadors\u201d and to provide funding to \u201cestablish consortia of two to five institutions each\u201d that will build programs providing \u201ctraining, infrastructure, mentorship, and resources for at least four appointed scholars per award.\u201d The agency also intends to establish an eventually self-sufficient U.S. Reproducibility Network, modeled after one in the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n NIH also publicly launched Thursday a Linked Discoveries<\/a> tool in its National Library of Medicine\u2019s PubMed research paper database. In a news release<\/a>, the agency said the tool uses an \u201cAI-informed approach\u201d to identify publications related to an article a user is interested in, providing graph and timeline views to explore connections. <\/p>\n \u201cResearchers can narrow a neighborhood [of papers] by conditions, genes and chemicals and see information such as citation connections, reviews, retractions and NIH-funded publications,\u201d the release said. That neighborhood might show whether any replication studies have been done on particular publications.<\/p>\n In his editorial, Bhattacharya called on the academic community to help in this effort to ensure that scientific publications are reliable. <\/p>\n \u201cResearch institutions should extend concerns to examine whether hiring, promotion, and recognition reward rigor as well as novelty,\u201d he wrote. \u201cPublishers should create venues for replication and reproducibility studies. Funders should recognize that independent verification is not secondary to discovery; it is part of what makes discovery useful. Scientific leaders should make clear that correcting or refining the scientific record is an achievement.\u201d <\/p>\n Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said study reproducibility has been discussed for a long time. She said all these efforts are trying to address a bigger question: \u201cDo research results translate into clinical practice or improvements in health in ways that matter?\u201d<\/p>\n The important thing, she added, is \u201cless about discovering which studies are wrong and more about just continually refining our knowledge through the scientific process.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya (left) has advocated for more scientists to attempt to reproduce or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":909050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,3326,2555,3172,21568,180,44,128],"class_list":["post-909049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-career","tag-education","tag-events","tag-higher","tag-jobs","tag-news","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}