There is vigorous debate about the reproducibility of research findings in cancer biology. Whether scientists can accurately assess which experiments will reproduce original findings is important to determining the pace at which science self-corrects. We collected forecasts from basic and preclinical cancer researchers on the first 6 replication studies conducted by the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) to assess the accuracy of expert judgments on specific replication outcomes. On average, researchers forecasted a 75% probability of replicating the statistical significance and a 50% probability of replicating the effect size, yet none of these studies successfully replicated on either criterion (for the 5 studies with results reported). Accuracy was related to expertise: experts with higher h-indices were more accurate, whereas experts with more topic-specific expertise were less accurate. Our findings suggest that experts, especially those with specialized knowledge, were overconfident about the RP:CB replicating individual experiments within published reports; researcher optimism likely reflects a combination of overestimating the validity of original studies and underestimating the difficulties of repeating their methodologies.

关于癌症生物学研究结果的可重复性，存在激烈的争论。科学家能否准确评估哪些实验将重现原始发现，对于确定科学自我纠正的速度很重要。我们收集了有关可重复性项目：癌症生物学（RP：CB）进行的前6个复制研究的基础和临床前癌症研究人员的预测，以评估专家对特定复制结果的判断的准确性。平均而言，研究人员预测复制统计学显着性的概率为75％，复制效应大小的概率为50％，但这些研究均未在任何一个标准上成功复制（对于5项报告结果的研究）。准确性与专业知识有关：h指数较高的专家更为准确，而具有特定主题专业知识的专家则准确性较低。我们的发现表明，专家，尤其是具有专门知识的专家，对RP：CB在已发表的报告中复制单个实验过于自信。研究人员的乐观情绪可能反映了高估原始研究的有效性和低估重复其研究方法的困难的综合作用。