‘Scientific rigor and the art of motorcycle maintenance‘ was another recent fine analysis on reliability issues in current biomedicine (Munafo et al. Nat Biotechnol. 32:871-3). If you only want to read one article, this may be it. It nicely  sums up the problems and suggests all the relevant measures (see most of my previous posts). But besides the reference to Robert Pirsig’s 1974 novel, what is new on the article is the comparison of the scientific enterprise to the automobile industry, which successfully responded to quality problems with structured quality control (for a more thorough treatment, see the previous post on trust and auditing).  Here is their conclusion:

‘Science is conducted on the principle that it is self-correcting, but the extent to which this is true is an empirical question. The more that quality control becomes integrated into the scientific process itself, the more the whole process becomes one of continual improvement. Implementing this at the level of production implies a culture of incentivizing, educating and empowering those responsible for production, rather than policing quality after the fact with ‘quality inspectors’ (i.e., peer reviewers) or, even more distally, requiring attempts at replication. We think this insight, applied successfully to automobile manufacturing in the 1970s, can also be profitably applied to the practice of scientific research to build a more solid foundation of knowledge and accelerate the research endeavor.’

It is time to act!