ReproducibilityReproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a statistical analysis of a data set should be achieved again with a high degree of reliability when the study is replicated. There are different kinds of replication but typically replication studies involve different researchers using the same methodology.
ReproductionReproduction (or procreation or breeding) is the biological process by which new individual organisms – "offspring" – are produced from their "parent" or parents. Reproduction is a fundamental feature of all known life; each individual organism exists as the result of reproduction. There are two forms of reproduction: asexual and sexual. In asexual reproduction, an organism can reproduce without the involvement of another organism. Asexual reproduction is not limited to single-celled organisms.
Reproducibility ProjectThe Reproducibility Project: Psychology was a crowdsourced collaboration of 270 contributing authors to repeat 100 published experimental and correlational psychological studies. This project was led by the Center for Open Science and its co-founder, Brian Nosek, who started the project in November 2011. The results of this collaboration were published in August 2015. Reproducibility is the ability to produce the same findings, using the same methodologies as the original work, but on a different dataset (for instance, collected from a different set of participants).
Probabilistic numericsProbabilistic numerics is an active field of study at the intersection of applied mathematics, statistics, and machine learning centering on the concept of uncertainty in computation. In probabilistic numerics, tasks in numerical analysis such as finding numerical solutions for integration, linear algebra, optimization and simulation and differential equations are seen as problems of statistical, probabilistic, or Bayesian inference.
Replication crisisThe replication crisis (also called the replicability crisis and the reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.
Numerical weather predictionNumerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in the 1950s that numerical weather predictions produced realistic results. A number of global and regional forecast models are run in different countries worldwide, using current weather observations relayed from radiosondes, weather satellites and other observing systems as inputs.
Vegetative reproductionVegetative reproduction (also known as vegetative propagation, vegetative multiplication or cloning) is any form of asexual reproduction occurring in plants in which a new plant grows from a fragment or cutting of the parent plant or specialized reproductive structures, which are sometimes called vegetative propagules. Many plants naturally reproduce this way, but it can also be induced artificially. Horticulturists have developed asexual propagation techniques that use vegetative propagules to replicate plants.