This illustration was created for eLife, for 'The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology', where reproducibility in preclinical cancer research was investigated. It was a collaboration between the Centre for Open Science and Science Exchange. Selected experiments from 50 well-known papers in cancer biology were replicated. In short, results from all experiments were combined and analysed and the research group involved reported on the challenges they encountered throughout the process of replicating the experiments.
The more repeats, the lower the chance of a mistake occurring and thus the more reliable the results will be. This means a trial must be easily replicable, so repeated trials can be compared and combined.