The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative

Abstract

Most efforts to estimate the reproducibility of published findings have focused on specific areas of research, even though science is usually assessed and funded on a regional or national basis. Here we describe a project to assess the reproducibility of findings in biomedical science published by researchers based in Brazil. The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is a systematic, multicenter effort to repeat between 60 and 100 experiments: the project will focus on a set of common methods, repeating each experiment in three different laboratories from a countrywide network. The results, due in 2021, will allow us to estimate the level of reproducibility of biomedical science in Brazil, and to investigate what aspects of the published literature might help to predict whether a finding is reproducible.

Keywords: Brazil; biochemistry; biomedical research; cell biology; chemical biology; metascience; mouse; open science; rat; replication; reproducibility.

Figure 1.. Selecting methods and papers for replication in the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.

(A) Most frequent biological models used in main experiments within a sample of 100 Brazilian life sciences articles. (B) Most frequent methods used for quantitative outcome detection in these experiments. ‘Cell count’, ‘enzyme activity’ and ‘blood tests’ include various experiments for which methodologies vary and/or are not described fully in articles. Nociception tests, although frequent, were not considered for replication due to animal welfare considerations. (C) Flowchart describing the first full-text screening round to identify articles in our candidate techniques, which led us to select our final set of five methods.