Papers are getting more rigorous, but progress is slower than some researchers would like.
SciScore searches the text in papers' methods sections for around 20 pieces of key information, which act as proxies for how rigorous the experiments are, and how easy it would be for other researchers to reproduce them.
The researchers who created SciScore analysed 1.58 million freely available life-sciences papers indexed in the PubMed Central database. They found that between 1997 and 2019, the average score across all papers more than doubled, from 2 out of 10 to 4.2. The study, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv on 18 January1, says this rise shows that scientists are increasingly including fine detail about their experiments. (F: Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Nature News 22.01.20)