Recent advances in further research on irreproducible results: a generalization.

Abstract

One of the key results arising from the JOINT experiments into coastal upwelling during the decade of the 1970s was the unexpected discovery by Badan-Dangon (1981) that events in different upwelling regions, in different years, and in different oceans exhibited correlations at high levels of significance. This pioneering work, published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, stimulated the present investigation into the meaning of reproducibility, its relation to the peer review process, and its role in recent scientific controversies. Rules of reproducibility are tentatively suggested and then applied to several case studies. It seems that peer review itself is not convincingly reproducible and that scientists are not always as conscientious as they ought in observing accepted norms for reproducibility of their results.