Ripeta CEO, Leslie McIntosh, PhD and Sarah Nathan, Editor, published a new article on Medium last week on trust in science in the time of Coronavirus. This timely piece recommends that trust in science be based more on research transparency and reproducibility – instead of exclusively on journal impact factor or author degrees.
“The research community has long held that reproducibility — not prestige — is the true marker of scientific quality. For an article to be reproducible, an unaffiliated researcher must be able to find the information necessary to redo the study and garner similar results. In essence, then, reproducibility is synonymous with vulnerability. It asks that researchers lay bare their methods and data, opening themselves up to scrutiny. Though the recently retracted articles would certainly not have been reproduced yet, that vulnerability alone could push researchers to improve the quality of their methods and data sets.”