Detecting signal from science:The structure of research communities and prior knowledge improves prediction of genetic regulatory experiments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Belikov, Alexander V., Rzhetsky, Andrey, Evans, James
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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author Belikov, Alexander V.
Rzhetsky, Andrey
Evans, James
author_facet Belikov, Alexander V.
Rzhetsky, Andrey
Evans, James
contents The explosive growth of scientists, scientific journals, articles and findings in recent years exponentially increases the difficulty scientists face in navigating prior knowledge. This challenge is exacerbated by uncertainty about the reproducibility of published findings. The availability of massive digital archives, machine reading and extraction tools on the one hand, and automated high-throughput experiments on the other, allow us to evaluate these challenges at scale and identify novel opportunities for accelerating scientific advance. Here we demonstrate a Bayesian calculus that enables the positive prediction of robust, replicable scientific claims with findings automatically extracted from published literature on gene interactions. We matched these findings, filtered by science, with unfiltered gene interactions measured by the massive LINCS L1000 high-throughput experiment to identify and counteract sources of bias. Our calculus is built on easily extracted publication meta-data regarding the position of a scientific claim within the web of prior knowledge, and its breadth of support across institutions, authors and communities, revealing that scientifically focused but socially and institutionally independent research activity is most likely to replicate. These findings recommend policies that go against the common practice of channeling biomedical research funding into centralized research consortia and institutes rather than dispersing it more broadly. Our results demonstrate that robust scientific findings hinge upon a delicate balance of shared focus and independence, and that this complex pattern can be computationally exploited to decode bias and predict the replicability of published findings. These insights provide guidance for scientists navigating the research literature and for science funders seeking to improve it.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2008_09985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detecting signal from science:The structure of research communities and prior knowledge improves prediction of genetic regulatory experiments
Belikov, Alexander V.
Rzhetsky, Andrey
Evans, James
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Molecular Networks
J.2; I.6.3
The explosive growth of scientists, scientific journals, articles and findings in recent years exponentially increases the difficulty scientists face in navigating prior knowledge. This challenge is exacerbated by uncertainty about the reproducibility of published findings. The availability of massive digital archives, machine reading and extraction tools on the one hand, and automated high-throughput experiments on the other, allow us to evaluate these challenges at scale and identify novel opportunities for accelerating scientific advance. Here we demonstrate a Bayesian calculus that enables the positive prediction of robust, replicable scientific claims with findings automatically extracted from published literature on gene interactions. We matched these findings, filtered by science, with unfiltered gene interactions measured by the massive LINCS L1000 high-throughput experiment to identify and counteract sources of bias. Our calculus is built on easily extracted publication meta-data regarding the position of a scientific claim within the web of prior knowledge, and its breadth of support across institutions, authors and communities, revealing that scientifically focused but socially and institutionally independent research activity is most likely to replicate. These findings recommend policies that go against the common practice of channeling biomedical research funding into centralized research consortia and institutes rather than dispersing it more broadly. Our results demonstrate that robust scientific findings hinge upon a delicate balance of shared focus and independence, and that this complex pattern can be computationally exploited to decode bias and predict the replicability of published findings. These insights provide guidance for scientists navigating the research literature and for science funders seeking to improve it.
title Detecting signal from science:The structure of research communities and prior knowledge improves prediction of genetic regulatory experiments
topic Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Molecular Networks
J.2; I.6.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09985