Reproducibility

Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a statistical analysis of a data set should be achieved again with a high degree of reliability when the study is replicated. There are different kinds of replication^[1] but typically replication studies involve different researchers using the same methodology. Only after one or several such successful replications should a result be recognized as scientific knowledge.

With a narrower scope, reproducibility has been defined in computational sciences as having the following quality: the results should be documented by making all data and code available in such a way that the computations can be executed again with identical results.

In recent decades, there has been a rising concern that many published scientific results fail the test of reproducibility, evoking a reproducibility or replication crisis.