Information Quality

11InfoQ and reproducible research

11.1 Introduction

The scientific press appears to be witnessing a confusion of terms, with reproducibility, repeatability, and replicability being given different and sometimes conflicting meanings (Kenett and Shmueli, 2015). Statistical work is focused on addressing the needs of the scientific, industrial, business, and service communities, and lack of clarity in terms is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed.

Reproducible research has been a topic of interest for many years, with famous controversies such as the water memory papers. In a 1988 paper published in Nature, Benveniste et al. reported that white blood cells called basophils, which control the body’s reaction to allergens, can be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have been diluted so much that they contain none of these biomolecules at all. It was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with, so that a biological effect remained when the antibodies were no longer present. This seemingly validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines. The editor at the time, John Maddox, prefaced the paper with an editorial comment entitled “When to believe the unbelievable,” which admitted: “There is no objective explanation of these observations.” The editor questioned the quality of the information provided by the original research, but went ahead with the ...