Workshop: Improving Inference in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology-Charlottesville, Virginia; November 12-13, 2015

有效科学的一个标志是可重复性的结果。如果一个结果不能重现，它就不能被认为是强有力的科学发现。不幸的是，在生态学和进化生物学以及许多其他学科中，障碍往往会减缓这些强大的、可重现的观测的进展。科学家因公布令人兴奋的结果而得到奖励，但科学家发表平淡无奇的结果或测试先前发表的发现的重现性的动机要少得多。因此，科学家经常在他们的数据中搜索最令人兴奋的发现，以便在最负盛名的期刊上发表文章，而他们通常不会投资于寻求发表他们的全套结果。这种做法和各种相关的做法导致了公布的假阳性率过高--结果是偶然的结果，而不是真正的生物现象。由于复制先前发现的尝试通常很少，这些假阳性的错误通常在很长一段时间内都没有被识别出来。即使在存在复制的情况下，由于缺乏促进跨研究有效合成的标准，也无法从中得出结论。减少偏见，促进复制和有效的综合，将需要改变控制目前指导科学家决策的激励的机构。形成激励机制的主要机构之一是科学期刊。一些学科的期刊，如心理学和神经科学，已经开始引入创新的编辑政策，以减少偏见，促进复制。现在，生态学家和进化生物学家正在寻求开发适合他们自己学科的想法。这个项目是一个研讨会，生态学和进化生物学领域的著名期刊编辑将与对改进科学推理感兴趣的研究人员一起，在这些学科中开发激励结构，以降低假阳性率，促进复制，并促进研究综合。到研讨会结束时，组织者希望起草编辑政策模板和其他想法，以形成对这些学科有意义的激励结构。组织者还希望，期刊编辑和其他人随后将实施适合其学科和期刊的政策，并希望在这些初步政策实施之后的讨论将促进更广泛地采用政策，以改善其学科的经验进展。

A hallmark of effective science is reproducible results. If a result cannot be reproduced, it cannot be considered a robust scientific finding. Unfortunately, obstacles often slow progress towards these robust, reproducible observations in ecology and evolutionary biology as well as in many other disciplines. Scientists are rewarded for publicizing exciting results, but scientists have much less incentive to publish unexciting results or to test the reproducibility of previously published findings. Scientists therefore often search their data for the most exciting findings that will allow them to publish in the most prestigious journals, and they often do not invest in seeking to publish their full set of results. This and various related practices leads to an inflated rate of published false positives - results that are the outcome of chance rather than real biological phenomena. Because attempts to replicate prior findings are often rare, the error of these false positives often goes unrecognized for long periods. Even when replications exist, drawing conclusions from them is hindered by a lack of standards to promote effective syntheses across studies. Reducing bias and promoting replication and effective synthesis will require changing the institutions that control the incentives currently guiding scientists' decisions. One of the major classes of institutions shaping incentives is scientific journals. Journals in some disciplines, such as psychology and neuroscience, have begun introducing innovative editorial policies to reduce bias and facilitate replication. Now ecologists and evolutionary biologists are seeking to develop ideas appropriate for their own disciplines. This project is a workshop in which prominent journal editors in ecology and evolutionary biology will join with researchers interested in improving scientific inference to develop incentive structures in these disciplines that will reduce false positive rates, promote replication, and facilitate research synthesis. By the end of the workshop, the organizers hope to have drafts of editorial policy templates and other ideas for shaping incentive structures that make sense for these disciplines. The organizers also hope that journal editors and others will then implement policies that are right for their disciplines and journals, and that the discussions that follow in the wake of these initial policy implementations will promote more widespread adoptions of policies that improve empirical progress in their disciplines.