[fastball]

Depends on the experiment. Oil drop is based around something we "know" exists (the charge of an electron) and is just trying to measure it. Measuring a fundamental value is a very different kind of experiment than trying to determine if something exists at all in a wildly multi-variate system (most of the research suffering from reproducibility issues).

Not every experiment needs to be reproducible in exactly the same way, just like not every study needs to be double-blind. You need to interrogate the reason the experiment exists in the first place.

I guess another way of saying it is this: even though Millikan's actual final result is not reproducible because he fudged his numbers, the scientific method employed in the experiment is valid, which is really all you need in the case of that experiment.

The problem with medicine / psychology / other less "hard" research is that in many instances it doesn't matter if the method is reproducible if the results are not. If the goal is to show that eating pancakes cause depression the result is actually all that matters.

Thanks for the link, I will give it a read.