Is the drive for reproducible science having a detrimental effect on what is published?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a critique of the part played by the reproducible research movement within the scientific community. In particular, it raises concerns about the strong influence the movement is having on which papers are published. The primary effect is through changes to the peer review process. These not only require that the data and software used to generate the reported results be part of the review but also that the novelty criterion should be deprecated. This paper questions a central tenet of the movement, the idea of a single, well‐defined, and iterative scientific method. Philosophers, historians of science, and scientists alike have argued extensively against the idea of a single method. Some going as far as to suggest that there are as many methods as scientists. I am convinced that there are broad, high‐level ideas that bind scientists together. Yet, anything more sharply delineated that could reasonably be entitled a scientific method is not logically or historically justified. If this criticism is accepted, then changes to the peer review process are not warranted. Furthermore, I would contend that the influence the reproducible research movement is having on the publishing of papers, and elsewhere, should be considerably curtailed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reproducibility · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | high |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Reproducibility · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | high |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.677 | 0.829 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.041 | 0.044 |
| Open science | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.032 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".