An illustration of reproducibility in neuroscience research in the absence of selective reporting

Abstract

The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p-hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multi-site collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left-right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we re-visited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta-analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and uncorrected significance at p<0.05. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an ideal publishing environment, i.e. free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate per dataset, over all effects, of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. There is clearly substantial room to improve reproducibility in brain MRI research through increasing statistical power. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically-used sample sizes.