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by eli_gottlieb 3549 days ago
>People are not supposed to communicate only via papers.

A paper and its supplementary materials are supposed to be enough to reproduce the experiment. In practice, this often fails, but that is a fault in the scientific process. Science isn't just about empirical knowledge, it's about public and redundant empirical knowledge, as opposed to losing important knowledge of the natural world when the original investigator gets hit by a bus.
1 comments
TheCoelacanth 3549 days ago
Wouldn't those problems in the scientific process get corrected more easily if you contacted the original author to see if there are any details that were missed and then publish those details with your results instead of just publishing a paper that says "Nope, couldn't reproduce"?
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pixl97 3549 days ago
No, you publish the results that you cannot reproduce.

Then maybe the next generation of researchers documents their work better.

Or maybe the original researcher publishes a v2 edition of their paper.

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