How to trust a scientist

Why research integrity matters and how it can be improved

Scholars need to be able to trust each other, because otherwise they cannot collaborate and use each other's findings. Similarly trust is essential for research to be applied for individuals, society or the natural environment. The trustworthiness is threatened when researchers engage in questionable research practices or worse. By adopting open science practices, research becomes transparent and accountable. Only then it is possible to verify whether trust in research findings is justified. The magnitude of the issue is substantial with a prevalence of four percent for both fabrication and falsification, and more than 50% for questionable research practices. This implies that researchers regularly engage in behaviors that harm the validity and trustworthiness of their work. What is good for the quality and reliability of research is not always good for a scholarly career. Navigating this dilemma depends on how virtuous the researcher at issue is, but also on the local research climate and the perverse incentives in the way the research system functions. Research institutes, funding agencies and scholarly journals can do a lot to foster research integrity, first and foremost by improving the quality of peer review and reforming researcher assessment.

Understanding and tackling the reproducibility crisis - Why we need to study scientists' trust in data

In the life sciences, there is an ongoing discussion about a perceived 'reproducibility crisis'. However, it remains unclear to which extent the perceived lack of reproducibility is the consequence of issues that can be tackled and to which extent it may be the consequence of unrealistic expectations of the technical level of reproducibility. Large-scale, multi-institutional experimental replication studies are very cost- and time-intensive. This Perspective suggests an alternative, complementary approach: meta-research using sociological and philosophical methodologies to examine researcher trust in data. An improved understanding of the criteria used by researchers to judge data reliability will provide crucial, initial evidence on the actual scale of the reproducibility crisis and on measures to tackle it.