# Top journals require an independent lab to reproduce key findings before publication

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-two-lab-rule/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-two-lab-rule` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

For the biggest claims, journals would require that a second, independent laboratory repeated the central experiment before the paper is accepted.

## Summary

Some fields (particle physics with independent detectors, genome-wide association studies with replication cohorts) require independent confirmation as a condition of publication. Cancer biology does not. Top journals could require, for papers whose central claim is a therapeutic effect in a model system, that an independent lab (declared, without shared authorship interests) reproduce the key experiment, with the replication reported in the paper.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Hypothesis: Papers published under the rule will replicate in subsequent independent studies at more than twice the rate of comparable papers published without it.
- Rationale: Genome-wide association studies were plagued by false positives until replication cohorts became mandatory, after which findings became highly reliable.
- Proposed test: One high-impact journal adopts the rule for therapeutic claims; track replication outcomes of the first 50 papers against matched papers elsewhere.
- Maturity: speculative
- Actor: policy

## Sources

- Bottleneck evidence (Preclinical results do not reproduce): Errington et al., Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology (eLife 2021): https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601

## Connected records

- ideas: [Independent replication of the key experiment before first-in-human academic trials](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-replication-before-ind/), [Multi-laboratory preclinical trials as the standard for go/no-go decisions](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-multilab-preclinical/)
- bottlenecks: [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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