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Quite often when I read a medical research article I wonder whether other researchers tried to reproduce the experiment. I could go through the list of papers that cite the article but I find this solution a bit tedious and inefficient for this task.

Is there any database that lists reproduction attempts (with ideally the number of fail and successful reproductions)?

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3 Answers 3

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While not a direct answer, publishing failure to reproduce can be difficult as a standalone activity (think cost, time, and rewards), and where reproducibility information does exist, it may be field or community specific (like blog-syn for organic chemistry).

But there are a few large and well-funded studies that aggregate information simply because their purpose was to replicate big studies- eg the Cancer Biology Reproducibility initiative, and perhaps some of these studies will grow over time.

You may also want to check sites such as Pubmed Commons and PubPeer, which increasingly are gathering discussion of papers.

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In clinical study in medicine, meta analysis, accumulating data on several different papers on the same theme, is the methodology to find the overall effect size of the intervention. Cochrane database is most famous one which gathers such systematic review.

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The quick answer is, there does not seem to be a database concerned directly with reproducing experiments in medicine. The closest seems to be what is done in just about all meta-analysis papers - they do repeated keyword searches in MEDLINE, EMBASE, Science Citation Index, Cochrane registry and similar. The Institutes of Health have a clinical trial registry that's worth looking into, because some trials may never end up being published.

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