Introduction to the special issue on reproducibility in neuroimaging

Abstract

The last decade has seen increasing attention to the problem of scientific reproducibility, across a broad range of scientific fields (Camerer et al., 2016;Morrison, 2014;Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Within the field of neuroimaging, there has been a particular focus on issues of analytic variability (Bowring et al., 2019;Carp, 2012) statistical power (Button et al., 2013;Poldrack et al., 2017), and test-retest reliability (Bennett and Miller, 2013), all of which have raised alarms regarding the potential for irreproducible results. In addition, failed replications (Boekel et al., 2015;Dinga et al., 2019) and meta-analytic null results (Müller et al., 2017) have raised particular concern about studies of group and individual differences. This special issue was developed in light of these emerging concerns, with the goal of highlighting and encouraging work that aims to both quantify and improve the reproducibility of neuroimaging research. Here we provide a brief overview of the papers within this special issue.