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

Scientists have increasingly recognised that low methodological and analytical rigour 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 multicentre 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 multicentre 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.

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

Scientists have increasingly recognised that low methodological and analytical rigour 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 multicentre 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 multicentre 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.

The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.

Most efforts to estimate the reproducibility of published findings have focused on specific areas of research, even though science is usually assessed and funded on a regional or national basis. Here we describe a project to assess the reproducibility of findings in biomedical science published by researchers based in Brazil. The Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative is a systematic, multicenter effort to repeat between 60 and 100 experiments: the project will focus on a set of common methods, repeating each experiment in three different laboratories from a countrywide network. The results, due in 2021, will allow us to estimate the level of reproducibility of biomedical science in Brazil, and to investigate what aspects of the published literature might help to predict whether a finding is reproducible.