Nature survey of 1,576 researchers — >70% failed to reproduce others' experiments

A Nature survey of 1,576 researchers found that more than 70% had failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than 50% had failed to reproduce their own (S-0047).

The respondents are self-selected (they engaged with a Nature survey on reproducibility), which biases toward researchers thinking about reproducibility in the first place. The result is therefore a directional rather than a population estimate, but it is a directional estimate at the upper bound of plausibility — the population of researchers most attentive to reproducibility includes 70% who have hit the wall personally.

The case is empirical input for C-0022. Reproducibility failures, as experienced by the people doing science day-to-day, are not edge cases; they are the modal experience.