October 24, 2016 – Reproducibility

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Anchor lead: As taxpayers, we’re all vested in scientific studies that can be reproduced, Elizabeth Tracey reports

The majority of scientific studies are funded with taxpayer dollars through the NIH, but often are revealed as flawed when another researcher tries to repeat them.  Paul Rothman, dean and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, describes a novel program to warehouse original data being undertaken at Johns Hopkins to help.

Rothman: Historically that retention of data has been up to the individual researcher, investigator to keep.  There’s heterogeneity in terms of their ability or their desire to keep that old data, so we’re going to try to pilot an institutional resource, a data bank, where people can put the primary data that was utilized for publications in a central place where if anyone would have to go back they could see the primary data that was utilized in the paper.  :30

Rothman says the most worrisome aspect of flawed research is the potential for compromising clinical care.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.