Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A clinical trial paper that follows CONSORT 2010 with full protocol deposit on a registry.
- Is an instance
An animal-study paper following ARRIVE 2.0 with complete husbandry and randomisation details.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A bit-identical re-run of code (computational, not methods).
- Not an instance
A new study on a new sample (replicability).
Editorial commentary
Methods reproducibility is the degree to which a study’s methods are reported in sufficient detail that another investigator could re-implement them, independent of whether the same numerical or empirical results would follow. It is a property of the published record — the write-up — not of any actual re-run.
The reproducibility family: how the terms differ
Goodman, Fanelli, and Ioannidis (2016) proposed three senses of reproducibility that this dictionary keeps distinct because they fail independently: methods reproducibility (this term — can the procedure be re-implemented from the write-up?), results reproducibility (see results reproducibility — do the deposited data and code, when re-run, recreate the published numbers?), and inferential reproducibility (see inferential reproducibility — does an independent analyst reach the same qualitative conclusion, possibly by a different route?). CASRAI’s dictionary adds two further, narrower senses used in bench-science and computing contexts: computational reproducibility (same code + same data → same numbers, a technical subset of results reproducibility) and empirical reproducibility (repeating a laboratory or field procedure under matched conditions gets consistent observations — the non-computational analogue of this term). A study can score well on methods reproducibility (a reviewer agrees the methods section is detailed enough to redo the experiment) while failing computational reproducibility (the deposited code doesn’t actually run) or empirical reproducibility (a wet-lab repeat gives a different result) — the four are genuinely independent properties, not degrees of the same thing.
Where the bar is set
Methods reproducibility is the standard that reporting guidelines target directly — CONSORT (trials), ARRIVE (animal research), PRISMA (systematic reviews), STROBE (observational studies) — each specifying what a methods section must state so that “another investigator could redo this” is a testable claim rather than an assumption. See Writing the Methods Section So It Can Be Reproduced for the practical checklist.
Sources
Goodman, Fanelli & Ioannidis, “What does research reproducibility mean?” Science Translational Medicine (2016).
Also known as
transparent reporting · reporting reproducibility
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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