Talk 02: Identifying Barriers to Reproducibility: An Ethnographic Study of a Hands-on Workshop
Channel: Librarians Building Momentum for Reproducibility
Date: 2020-02-03

Title: Identifying Barriers to Reproducibility: An Ethnographic Study of a Hands-on Workshop
Speakers: Lisa Federer, Maryam Zaringhalam
Abstract: In recent years, alarms have been raised over instances of irreproducibility in science, including biomedical research. Overcoming this issue requires understanding the practical challenges and barriers that contribute to reproducibility problems. This talk will describe some of the factors contributing to lack of reproducibility in the biomedical literature based on the experiences of researchers participating in a hands-on reproducibility workshop hosted by the National Library of Medicine. During the three-day workshop, teams attempted to reproduce the results of published studies that made their data and code available in publicly accessible repositories. The workshop also included brief lectures on tools for reproducibility, like Docker containers and Git, that participants could use to make their own research more reproducible. Of ten teams at two workshops, none of the teams could fully reproduce the studies. This study takes a grounded theory ethnographic approach to understand processes employed by researchers in attempting to reproduce research results, thereby elucidating characteristics of the publications and their related data and software code that lead to breakdowns in these processes that lead to irreproducibility of research results. This talk will also discuss how the issues identified as contributing to reproducibility could be addressed by librarians working with research teams.



For the 2020 conference, "Librarians Building Momentum for Reproducibility"