Two years into the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative: reflections on conducting a large-scale replication of Brazilian biomedical science

Abstract

Scientists have increasingly recognized that low methodological and analytical rigor combined with publish-or-perish incentives can make the published scientific literature unreliable. As a response to this, large-scale systematic replications of the literature have emerged as a way to assess the problem empirically. The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is one such effort, aimed at estimating the reproducibility of Brazilian biomedical research. Its goal is to perform multicenter replications of a quasi-random sample of at least 60 experiments from Brazilian articles published over a 20-year period, using a set of common laboratory methods. In this article, we describe the challenges of managing a multicenter project with collaborating teams across the country, as well as its successes and failures over the first two years. We end with a brief discussion of the Initiative’s current status and its possible future contributions after the project is concluded in 2021.

Improving preclinical studies through replications

“…In the end, due to various problems, only 29 Registered Reports and 18 Replication Studies were published, and the overall conclusions of the project are currently being written up. The aim of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is to assess the reproducibility of biomedical science published by researchers based in Brazil ( Amaral et al, 2019 ; Neves et al, 2020 ). The studies selected had to use one of five experimental techniques, including behavioural and wet lab methods, on certain widely-used model organisms.…”