We recently published in BMC Medicine an evaluation of the comparative diagnostic performance of InSilicoVA, a software to map the underlying causes of death from verbal autopsy interviews. The developers of this software claim to have failed to replicate our results and appear to have also failed to locate our replication archive for this work. In this Correspondence, we provide feedback on how this might have been done more usefully and offer some suggestions to improve future attempts at reproducible research. We also offer an alternative interpretation of the results presented by Li et al., namely that, out of 100 verbal autopsy interviews, InSilicoVA will, at best, correctly identify the underlying cause of death in 40 cases and incorrectly in 60 – a markedly inferior performance to alternative existing approaches.

中文翻译：

---

生来就会失败：复制设计中的缺陷会产生预期的结果。

我们最近在 BMC Medicine 上发表了对 InSilicoVA 诊断性能比较的评估，该软件是一种通过口头尸检访谈绘制潜在死亡原因的软件。该软件的开发人员声称未能复制我们的结果，并且似乎也未能找到我们这项工作的复制存档。在本通讯中，我们提供了有关如何更有效地完成这项工作的反馈，并提供了一些建议以改进未来可重复研究的尝试。我们还对 Li 等人提出的结果提供了另一种解释，即在 100 次口头尸检访谈中，InSilicoVA 充其量只能正确识别 40 例死因，错误识别 60 例——明显较差替代现有方法的性能。