Why reproducibility is important for science

Major media outlets have reported on investigations showing that a significant percentage of scientific studies cannot be reproduced. This leads to other academics and society losing trust in scientific results (Baker, 2016). Working reproducibly means others can check your results - even early on in the research process. Thus, the full analysis and methodology is transparent. Scientific results and evidence are strengthened if they are reproduced and confirmed by several independent researchers. With all parts used in an analysis being available and/or documented, valuable time is saved reproducing published results and other researchers can easily build on these research results and re-use data or code for their analyses. In addition, so called "negative results" can be published easily, helping avoid other researchers wasting time repeating analyses that will not return the expected results (Dirnagl & Lauritzen, 2010).

1. Baker, M. (2016). Reproducibility crisis? Nature, 533(26), 353–366.
2. Dirnagl, U., & Lauritzen, M. (2010). Fighting Publication Bias: Introducing the Negative Results Section. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, 30(7), 1263–1264. https://doi.org/10.1038/jcbfm.2010.51