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Perspective

Identifying and Overcoming Threats to Reproducibility, Replicability, Robustness, and Generalizability in Microbiome Research

Patrick D. Schloss
Jacques Ravel, Editor
Patrick D. Schloss
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
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Jacques Ravel
University of Maryland School of Medicine
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DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00525-18
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ABSTRACT

The “reproducibility crisis” in science affects microbiology as much as any other area of inquiry, and microbiologists have long struggled to make their research reproducible. We need to respect that ensuring that our methods and results are sufficiently transparent is difficult. This difficulty is compounded in interdisciplinary fields such as microbiome research. There are many reasons why a researcher is unable to reproduce a previous result, and even if a result is reproducible, it may not be correct. Furthermore, failures to reproduce previous results have much to teach us about the scientific process and microbial life itself. This Perspective delineates a framework for identifying and overcoming threats to reproducibility, replicability, robustness, and generalizability of microbiome research. Instead of seeing signs of a crisis in others’ work, we need to appreciate the technical and social difficulties that limit reproducibility in the work of others as well as our own.

  • Copyright © 2018 Schloss.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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Identifying and Overcoming Threats to Reproducibility, Replicability, Robustness, and Generalizability in Microbiome Research
Patrick D. Schloss
mBio Jun 2018, 9 (3) e00525-18; DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00525-18

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Identifying and Overcoming Threats to Reproducibility, Replicability, Robustness, and Generalizability in Microbiome Research
Patrick D. Schloss
mBio Jun 2018, 9 (3) e00525-18; DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00525-18
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    • ABSTRACT
    • PERSPECTIVE
    • THREATS TO REPRODUCIBILITY
    • FOSTERING A CULTURE OF GREATER REPRODUCIBILITY AND REPLICABILITY
    • CONCLUSION
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KEYWORDS

American Academy of Microbiology
microbiome
reproducibility
research ethics
scientific method

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