A far from dismal outcome

SCIENCE works for two reasons. First, its results are based on experiments: extracting Mother Nature’s secrets by asking her directly, rather than by armchair philosophising. And a culture of openness and replication means that scientists are policed by their peers. Scientific papers include sections on methods so that others can repeat the experiments and check that they reach the same conclusions.

That, at least, is the theory. In practice, checking old results is much less good for a scientist’s career than publishing exciting new ones. Without such checks, dodgy results sneak into the literature. In recent years medicine, psychology and genetics have all been put under the microscope and found wanting. One analysis of 100 psychology papers, published last year, for instance, was able to replicate only 36% of their findings. And a study conducted in 2012 by Amgen, an American pharmaceutical company, could replicate only 11% of the 53 papers it reviewed.