# Reproducibility and negative results

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/reproducibility/  
OnCo record `reproducibility` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

A result is reproducible when someone else can get it again from the same data and code; a negative result is an experiment that did not show the hoped-for effect, and reporting it is how a field stops repeating dead ends.

## Summary

Reproducibility, closely related to replicability, is a major principle of the scientific method: results should be achieved again with high reliability (Wikipedia). A null result is one without the expected content, which does not support the hypothesis (Wikipedia). In cancer AI the published record is skewed towards wins, so frozen-foundation-model results that fail to beat a baseline, panels that wash out a gain or pretraining at scale that adds nothing are worth recording as findings, with the seeds, versions and checksums that let them be rerun.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: reproducibility; reproducible research; replicability; negative result; negative results; null result; honest negatives; reporting negative results
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/reproducibility.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility
- Wikipedia: null result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_result
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility

## Connected records

- terms: [Benchmarks, leaderboards and contamination](https://onco.cc/terms/leaderboard-benchmark/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [CITATION.cff (Citation File Format)](https://onco.cc/terms/citation-cff/), [Model cards and datasheets for datasets](https://onco.cc/terms/model-card/), [Pre-registered experiment](https://onco.cc/terms/pre-registered-experiment/), [Provenance fields for research data](https://onco.cc/terms/provenance-fields/), [Zenodo DOIs for data and code](https://onco.cc/terms/zenodo-doi/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/reproducibility.json